Chris Bourton ~ Developer of Lethos Designs

The feedback on Facebook’s new look, which emphasizes a stream of Twitter-like status updates, is almost universally, negative.
Why isn’t CEO Mark Zuckerberg listening to users? Because he doesn’t have to, he’s told employees.
A tipster leaked that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: “He said something like ‘the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers.’”
Also quoted by another Tipster, who has seen the email says, Zuckerberg implied that companies were “stupid” for “listening to their customers.” The anti-customer diktat has many Facebook employees up in arms, we hear.

I’ve said this before, and I like this example I’m about to share since it demonstrates a good point on how even a good Francise, can fail with bad design choices can making a big difference at the top. Just because you’ve made a huge name for yourself, like Facebook has done for Zuckerberg, doesn’t mean you can do what ever you want with design changes and think your users will eventually love it. Sure Ignoring users outcries can work, if it really is an improvement, but removing, or simplifying something is rarely ever considered an improvement, if your user base being as big as it is, loved it how it was.

I’m sure Sony Online Entertainment thought the same, when they did the same with “Star Wars Galaxies”. A huge MMO, gleaming with the potential of success, taking on a license to the one of the biggest game franchises ever.
A few years back now, at it’s peak had a shot at being a rival to “World of Warcraft”. Star Wars Galaxies was a complex game, nothing compared to “Eve Online” of course, but it still had a very nice character development structure, which allowed for a lot of flexibility, and players loved to freedom to choose how they did things with their characters, with the awe of Unlocking a Jedi.
World of Warcraft was the simple but well designed Behemoth, that sprang out of a classic style of War craft, it’s simple and easy design has stayed true to it’s self, and allowed for an easy uptake by a wide range of users, which lead to it’s eventual dominance over the MMO Market (personally never liked it, but appreciated it for what it was).

SWG was doing well, slowly growing, Until they made the fatal mistake of simplifying a lot of their features, character development, and general game-play to be more like WoW, and take a style nearer to their Console based quick and easy SW games and of course WoW.
The Players hated losing all that custom character development they had, and later on they made more changes again in the same direction, which eventually killed the game.
SWG Emulated versions sprang up all over the place, from the Pre-9 Publish era, and actually some have had some success, and been in touch with Ex-Team members that worked at the company, who left in disgust over the changes.

Shaking things up by adding features is always good, it’s that Simple… (this wasn’t the case with FB here – more was removed)
When you have Millions of users, and you are most definitely don’t want to start copying the competition, just because they are getting success, with a simpler design.
Stick to what your users like, and actually ADD to it, don’t Remove features. Give Options, Widgets, if you can’t control your jealously over another company filling a hole in your market.
Just accept with their design maybe it won’t work for you and yours users, but forcing a design change on a Multi-million user base is never going to go well, if you’ve removed something.

Assuming I’m right in saying this, FB tried to buy out Twitter, that failed/refused. It’s the Latest Fad, something new and fun to play with, with no ads, it can’t support it self, it relying on investment to be propped up.

Maybe that didn’t go over well, so jealous of the success, decide well They’ll take parts of what they felt made it a success, and put it directly into FB.
Have to remove features to do that of course, but Twitter can do it, so Can we type of attitude is being followed here, and we’ll have the same success.

What they’ve forgotten, is FB isn’t new, it’s in terms of the Web, it’s quiet well established Site, and Doing a change like this, won’t garner the same success as a new site, that has early on was very well catered to the needs and wants of Investors, and promoters, while giving a simple and easy to use “playground” for users.

It’s not unusual, big business doing buy-outs and if they they fail to achieve it, they’ll just try to beat them at what they wanted to buy if they can’t buy them out and have it for themselves.
He’s 24, right? About my age, and has had huge success at a comparative young age, for what has been achieved and it’s bound to go to his head.

Got Microsoft funding FB to keep it going, since the server, admin and general up-keep costs are reported to be too much to be covered by Ads apparently. Which is a little scary how much their bills must be, and how poorly their FB Ad network is performing… Simple, tone That down and just bring Up Google Adsense; You’ve already got Microsoft Tower Banners, it won’t be that bad.

He probably thinks he’s getting a free ride with Microsoft throwing money at FB to balance the books, and that’s all it’s doing, there is apparently no real profit at FB, it’s all a lot of money going in, and a very similar money being sucked up again.
Whats Crazy is this design change, actually puts more of a strain on the servers, a “Live-Feed” design, would theoretically be more intensive to the system, and that is easily proven by the spammy-ness increasing over this past week, I get a lot more messages, and news feeds appearing. A “Live-Feed” design encourages more activity, when Feeds aren’t Properly selectively chosen and users and Applications don’t have to jump through so many hoops to get noticed, because users have less control over what’s seen, so they just are saying same or similar things over and over again, or sometimes just non-sense, just to be noticed in the sea of “spam”.

While the Appearance might have tried to go for the simple Twitter look, the behind the scenes stuff, FB Platform was not originally designed to be like this, and I would bet has made more intensive than the old one and, it would explain the time outs many users have reported, that can’t be explained by coding bugs.