New Facebook: Everybody Just Calm Down

Our social networking habits have evolved a lot during the past several years. We started out with Friendster, then made the move to MySpace. Now we’ve forsaken the raunchy ads and busy layouts for the Lil’ Green Patches and status updates of Cambridge’s own Facebook.

The site has been warning users that its new interface would soon be the only way they could use the site. Today, the change became permanent, and the anti-New Facebookers are flipping out.

The group “I Hate The New Facebook” had 907,309 members when we last checked. “Please Keep the Old Facebook. The New Version is A Disaster” is up to 212,253. “Petition not to Automaticaly [sic] use the New Facebook Layout” has 17,057.

You know how we know all this? We checked our news feed, which as you might recall, outraged users protested when it was introduced in 2006. And then two weeks later they got used to it and started liking it—so much so that they got really angry when Facebook changed the way it looks on their screen.

So even though we love indignation as much as the next person, let’s get real. Users join these groups, but can’t stop obsessively checking their profiles long enough for it to negatively affect the company. So Facebook won’t make any changes, and in no time they won’t even notice the difference anymore. Thus, the revolution dies.

At least until the next redesign.

Logo from Facebook