Jared W. Smith

So after much impatience, sarcasm, and self-doubt, I finally got the updated Facebook look sometime while I was driving home from work yesterday. And you know, after all that, I’m somewhat underwhelmed.

In some ways, this reflects a major shift in how people use and interact with Facebook. The area where you enter status updates has been made into a more ambiguous “publisher” which will post status updates, notes, photos, and the like. It’s very FriendFeed-esque in this regard. A lot’s been made of a comparison to Twitter, but I think FriendFeed is a far more effective analogy because of the range of items you can share (regardless of linking, a tweet is a tweet is a tweet — 140 characters, no more, no less). But as Facebook always likes to do, they’ve watered it down and made it weird in some ways. Facebook was pretty straightforward to use because a status update was a status update, a photo post was a photo post, and the like. It’s all been melded together now, and that’s going to take a lot of time for a lot of folks to get used to.

The biggest problem with the publisher, though, is how inconsistently it’s rolled out throughout the site. At first glance, it seems as if Facebook is making a landmark shift towards Twitter-like functionality in its status updates by moving away from third-person updates (such as “Jared is fabbing tacos”):

The new Facebook publisher for the homepage and profile pages.

Dive into the Friends pages, though, and you get the same ol’ third-person status updater:

The old-school status updater on the Friends page (Status Updates sub-tab). Huh?

Facebook is basically making for high school relationship drama here by sending many mixed signals. I, for one, would prefer that they commit one way or the other — if, indeed, they want their status updates to be more Twitter-like, I’ll gladly oblige them by re-bridging my full Twitter feed, because it would make sense to do so. (In January, I argued that third-person status updates make Twitter-to-Facebook prohibitive.) Right now, the implementation is confusing. Facebook for so many years has forced the third-person format and to suddenly apply so much ambiguity to it by leaving it in some places (including the iPhone and BlackBerry apps) and changing it in others is a real head-scratcher.

One thing that is somewhat cool but watered down in ways only Facebook can is how “Likes” are now used to populate the “Highlights” pane on the right — which is, of course, headlined by an advertisement. You wouldn’t notice it was an ad except for the “sponsored” text underneath, though. If Facebook wants to borrow properly from FriendFeed, they should have likes and comments promote things within the stream and keep it in my view rather than relegating it to the right side. I still can’t keep track of what I “like,” so it’s ineffective as a tool to reference things later (something unheralded about FriendFeed likes).

My big takeaway from this? Facebook’s innovating less and less. I don’t know how else to put it, but there it is. Smaller, nimbler startups have outfoxed Facebook, and they’re now trying to play catchup and bring those features over to its own walled garden. For the first time in really a long time, the social Web has shifted and Facebook didn’t lead the charge. Things like photo tagging, News Feed, and the like pushed Facebook to the bleeding edge and forced change all across the social media spectrum (look how many sites have News Feed-like features now, such as Last.fm and, for that matter, MySpace). Now, Facebook is retooling itself to be more of a Twitter/FriendFeed equivalent amongst friends. Certainly more people put their eyes on Facebook than Twitter and FriendFeed probably see in a week, but they are no longer setting the agenda (at least right now). That could have major implications down the road as Facebook could easily be a gateway to services like Twitter and FriendFeed. While Facebook does indeed have a great deal of users, nothing is too big to fail; and things begin to falter when they stop innovating. Swing on down to the Chamber of Irrelevance and ask Netscape about that one — or Friendster, for that matter. The Internet Explorer team is quickly learning what this feeling is like, and I suspect that if you fast forward a year, and you might be asking MySpace the same thing. On the Internet, it’s always the smaller and nimbler creature that eventually wins out; and I’m beginning to wonder if Facebook’s hitting that apex. Time will tell.