New Facebook is lame, what about using that widescreen

Ok, the world et all reckon Facebook screwed up badly with their new design.

I concur...

People love knobs and buttons to tweak play and configure things (badly but hey), most of the comments I have read about the new approach relate it to twitter, but in many ways it's gone almost as brittle as MySpamSpace.

Remember Myspace, lets not even go there.

I have said it before that FB's biggest failure IMHO is groups, currently FB groups are a bit like buying a Che Guevara t-shirt and thinking your a revolutionary..

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Most people have the sucky new widescreens, some unlucky people have these 22" 1400x900 screens which say more about the lame influence of the Movie Industry than anything about usabilty.

Newspaper and books have traditionally an aspect ratio which is higher and than wider. That's because it's far more useful. As we are all climate change aware these days, I pose the question about all that white space on your average screen and how many black bubbles of CO2 are being wasted? Give us all more vertical resolution pleeeeaaasse
</TANGENT>

So back to FB. I would like to see the news feed break into an OPTIONAL Zac's Widescreen layout where I can see the summary (old style) newsfeed LHS, (with block this stupid app updates options please), with mouse over expanded views into the specific content RHS.

Why should we have to click and reload move just to see someone's profile, when the above approach achieves the same? Sure there is all this silly hitcount stats rubbish, but why not move to model which acknowledges information overload and allow us to quickly scan into something and then decide we want to read?

The newsfeed in FB was quite an innovation, no idea if it was FB who first pioneered this but they definitely got it out there.

So let's draw my two themes together, FB Groups could be the next big thing, all they need to do is adopt the same approach used for profiles for groups.

Where the F%&*%K is my newsfeed for groups? Discussions and comments are hidden, deep down and beneath one to two pages of boiler plate stuff that I honestly read once and then just blatantly IGNORE!!!!!

When I decide that I want to be a poster boy by joining a group which sounds cool or states a point, like "No Australian Internet Censorship", I don't really give a rats arse, ( I am refraining from swearing today) about 10 random people in the group.

As I am making a statement, similar to one sheep following another sheep who has found some nice tufts of green grass, all I care about is that there are 5 users or 2.5 million. Don't even get me started on the lame joke that viewing members of a FB group!!!

FB groups should be just like profiles, updates first, static info, a click away. Plus we need some innovative approaches to showing discussions, aka Gmail.

This could be so F%&^&%^king huge, it's unbelievable that FB have consistently failed to do anything in this area.

So in Zac's Widescreen FB, we have a two column home page, LHS has a configurable newsfeed with rollover insight into the newsfeed items. Groups becomes more like people and the conversation level will grow.

Twitter is something different and IMHO will never achieve the sheer joy of comments on FB about status updates.

Nuff said..... Time for my second Coffee of the day :)