IDG News Service —
Facebook will roll out a dramatic redesign of its member profile interface next month and much attention is being paid to the details and to how end users and developers will react.
It's hard to argue against the idea behind the redesign: to reduce profile clutter. One of Facebook's trademarks has been its clean layout, which many of its members value over the often visually strident MySpace profile pages.
Still, as Facebook has grown to about 70 million members and developers have created over 25,000 applications for the site, member profiles have become very busy with comments, graphics, lists, alerts and the like. And this even though Facebook members have limited ability to alter things like fonts and colors.
The redesign will attempt to unclutter the profiles by redistributing their components to different tabs. Current plans call for four main tabs -- for the activity feed, basic member information, photos and applications. Members will be able to add more application tabs.
In addition, the activity feed tab will feature a new authoring control panel, called the Publisher Box, for creating and posting content. Meanwhile, the profile will have at the top a new horizontal navigation line with drop-down menus for its core features.
IDG Infrastructure Service had a chance to talk this week with Mark Slee, the Facebook product manager in charge of the redesign. He explained why Facebook thinks the changes will be good for both end users and developers, and how Facebook is trying to ease them into the transition to the new profile interface. The following is an edited transcript of the interview:
IDGNS: Could you explain what the Publisher Box is for and how it works?
Slee: Today in Facebook there are a lot of different actions you can take and content you can create and it happens in different places across the site. For example, to upload photos, I go through the Photo application. If I want to write on someone's Wall, I do it through that specific box on their profile. If I want to SuperPoke someone, I have to do it through that application.
So we're looking to pull all those into one unified element to let users take all of these actions in a consistent manner so that it's more clear what the options are and what effect they'll have. Facebook's own applications will move towards this model: the Wall posting will take place through here, as well as writing a Note or adding Photos. The Publisher Box is also an integration point for third-party applications. So all developers will be able to provide their own user interfaces that'll tie into this element for whatever applications they can come up with.
