Facebook Changed... Again.

I wasn't planning to write about Facebook this week, but since they just rolled out a new homepage, I thought it would be an appropriate topic. And in case you're unfamiliar with it, it's very different from MySpace. Facebook is to re-connect and stay connected with people you already know. MySpace is more about finding new friends and being able to express yourself through music and HTML, LoL. After all, Facebook started out only being for colleges and universities, then extending to the workplace, then high schools, and finally, anyone.

If you're not on Facebook, get on it. There's no reason not to. It makes it easy to keep contact with friends, relatives, neighbors, and colleagues. And you can set your privacy settings to control what people see. Meaning, if you don't want to put up your job information, don't. If you don't want people to see your photo albums, you can make that happen. AND, if you only want certain lists of friends to see certain things (like, block your photos and wall comments from your co-workers), that's easy, too. Just group people together, and set a preference to keep that list from seeing stuff. You can also block individual people (ideal if you're a gamer and added a few friends solely for gaming purposes and you don't really know them in real life).

For those who have been on Facebook for years (I joined in the Fall of 2004), you've seen a TON of changes. Back before you could add pictures. Before there were applications. Before there were notes. When there were a finite number of groups, and it was still plausible to browse through ALL the groups in your network in just an hour or two. Before events. I fought just one of the renovations (the one that put "new" in front of the URL for a while), but I got over it.

The current homepage now has three columns, although the first one is pretty much just designed to allow you to navigate the middle column. I think that it made it much easier to see what's going on with certain people (for instance, I'm living in California, away from anyone in my LARGE family, so I created a group and put all my aunts, cousins, etc. in that list. Now I can get all the latest updates on them with one click). So far, while a lot of people have been complaining about the new format, I only have one complaint. My "lists" are now on my homepage, and I have a lot of groupings that are not for public viewing. Not that I'm in the library checking my Facebook, but still.

Because there are so many different sections of Facebook, it's not really ideal to cover all of them. However, they're not hard to explore, and while some people are only on it because it's "the thing to do," I really do support its effectiveness in keeping in touch so much more than classmates or reunion.com or Friendster, or any other website designed for this.