How the Facebook Redesign Works

redesign in particular. UM. In case you have been under a rock for the last four years, here's the brief overview of Facebook. It's an online social network, uh debuted in two thousand four and it was originally UM geared for college students, so that's what the For the first several months of development, it was pretty much just college kids using this to to build up groups of friends and keep in contact with each other and find out what each other are doing and all that sort of thing.

And then eventually Facebook opened it up to the public in general, and everyone and their dog got a Facebook page. And I'm not kidding there are dogs with Facebook pages and cats as well. They don't discriminate. Um. And then in August of two thousand six. So two years after debuted, Facebook announced that it was going to open up uh some of its programming to developers, and a year later, in two thousand seven, they actually allowed developers to use

Facebook as a platform. And then that's when you saw this explosion of of applications hit Facebook. So, um, if you are the person who has the zombie pirate, armored night Scribulous uh Facebook profile, you know exactly what I'm talking about here, unless, of course, that yours is one of the ones affected by a Scrabulous you might be you might be surprised to know there's there was a basically a knockoff of the game, the popular Scrabble brand crossword game by Hasbro UM And you might say, why

are you using the trademark name, Well, that's uh, somebody did a knockoff these two guys in India, um basically because Hasbro didn't have their own version of Scrabble on there. And you might say, why do I care about this program? Well, Scrabulous became huge. It was a very very popular way to network with with other Facebook users with friends and family.

Speaking from personal experience, been playing Scrabulous for for months with different family members across the country, and UH, Hasbro got a little jealous, and all of a sudden, everywhere you turn on all these websites after Scrabble UH made its debut and Hasbro is announcing a lawsuit against the creator Subscribulous. It's on every news site everywhere from the

United States to everywhere else in the world. It's amazing how a scrap bowl game became the talk of Facebook for you know, a week or more, right, actually months, really, because if you've been listening to other podcasts or if you've read the news, you probably have seen things about about this story. But really, let's let's let's try and keep this in mind. Describulous is just one of many programs that's on Facebook. In fact, I read one in one source that there are now more than twenty four

thousand programs on Facebook. That's a lot of programs. And the redesign kind of addresses this issue because here's here's how these programs work. Developers create their own applications, UH, they host them on their own servers, and then it links to Facebook. And if you subscribe to one of these applications, if you if you install it within your profile page, you give that developer the right to look

at your information. Now, Originally Facebook said we just want developers to look at whatever information they application needs to know in order to ron. So maybe that's just the number of friends you have or your profile name. But the problem is that there was not really a way to enforce that. So technically developers were getting as much information as they wanted that was available on your profile.

So that could be your birthday. Even friends who had set their profiles to private, if you UH installed an application on your profile, the developer would be able to look at that person's profile as if he or she were you. So there were some major privacy issues early

on with this UH, with all these programs coming up. Yeah, and I saw a report not too long ago about a student who had been asked to give up even more information, including his social Security number, and it got him in a lot of trouble because it allowed UH, it allows identity theft. So basically, once they've they've lulled you into a sense of secure where you're willing to

give up some information. You know, there are some people who are let's say less scrupulous, not scrupulous scrupulous than others, uh, you know, are are starting to ask for more information under the guys of hey, well we need this to

make your make the program work. And um, you know, there have been people who have been fooled into thinking that somebody is going to use this for a good purpose, and you know, it's a bit of social engineering on their part to get some information they probably shouldn't otherwise have. And and even on a more benign level, that it could mean something like selling your information to advertisers so that you could be the the the target of targeted advertising.

And uh, I don't know about you, but I think most people probably feel they see enough commercials as it is. Um. So, so yeah, this was a big problem and that was part of the reason Facebook was looking into its major redesign. And another part was just that if you go to a Facebook page and you look at someone's profile and this person has subscribed to a lot of these applications, uh,

the page gets pretty cluttered. That's true. Each of these applications has a little image that goes along with it. So if you tell the program that you're installing that you want to uh to include this in your profile, then it's going to put another little badge on there. It's it's not unlike I guess the badges you would see on the side of a fighter jet in World War Two every time they shot down another plane and get the little thing on the side of the nose

where you'd have, you know, sixteen different ones. Well, on Facebook, you know, you have, say, you have fifteen different applications installed, and you let it show that on your profile page. All of a sudden you've got this little string of little I don't know, probably sixteen by sixteen pixel or a thirty two by thirty two images, you know, representing

each of those applications. And and it gets worse than that because some of the applications also put will put a box in your profile page so that um, it'll it'll take up even more space on your profile. Now, not every application does that, but and you can choose

to not let it do that. But if you're not paying attention and you're just saying, oh, I want to be a pirate, Oh I want to be a zombie, Oh I want to be aware wolf, Oh I love this movie application, eventually you're you're a profile is just gonna be filled with all these different boxes and it's it's arranged vertically so you have to scroll down and down and down, and it may be that that it takes a good minute and a half to scroll all the way through your page, which is not very elegant.

So that was another part of the redesign. We should probably actually got around to talking about what the redesign looks like. It's it's pretty neat. Actually. They they've organized the Facebook profiles into tabbed pages, so everything is now organized within tabs, and all those applications are now in a tab called boxes. Um. I'm sure this probably has some of the developers a little peeved because it's if you're looking at the main profile page, you don't see

the applications there anymore. And I bet that's got some people rubbed the wrong way. That's true, but it doesn't make the the profile a lot easier to navigate. I mean, rather than having a list of all your applications and being limited to see only a few of them at a time, you can actually hit the applications tab and uh and see all the different applications in one place. Um. You can also, you know, there's also links to your

friends to your inbox. You'll see your status updates right there, and they opened up, UM, and they had basically three sections. You had your left navigation and then the main content on your profile, then another in the right rail. And they basically got rid of the entire left navigation scheme and put it into those tabs. So it really opens up a lot of white space and makes the page easier to uh, to get through. Right. It doesn't look nearly as busy as it used to, and it's I

think it's a it's a huge improvement. UM. I do use Facebook occasionally and UH, and I really do like the new layout. Now, if you haven't seen the new layout, that's probably because Facebook hasn't really rolled it out to the site at large, but you can check it out at www dot new dot Facebook dot com. That's in e w UM and that's where you can see the the the new design. And UH, I think it's pretty nifty.

I know too. Although a lot of the feedback that I've seen on blogs and different social networks that aren't Facebook and uh, a lot of the people who I follow have not been at all thrilled with it. But someone who might have been thrilled with it, um at

least enough to get hit with a lawsuit. UM. As a German organization which is uh sort of a very similar website called study vz, and they are accused of and I quote copying the look, feel, features and services and quote um of the Facebook uh layout according to the Financial Times, So they have actually gotten as close to Facebook as they could to the point where Facebook is willing to take legal action. So you know, it's um.

It's a popular layout for for social platform. Yeah. Whenever a new social networking site comes on, the inevitable comparisons against the two biggias MySpace and Facebook come around. And in some cases those comparisons you say, it doesn't just resemble it, it it's identical to it. And that's a that's not a not the best route to take. I think. Well, if you want to learn more, you should visit how

stuff works dot com and read how Facebook Works. Until then, we'll talk to you later for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you