The Twitter community is getting a lot better at sharing things—ideas, links, wacky happenings—that everyone else will actually be interested in and converse about (which is sort of the point) and moving away from straight lifecasting. Facebook is inherently more intimate so it may never make the full transition but even a small shift will show off the new look’s potential.

Anyway, this is another reason I think a better filter would be useful. There’s a select group of people from whom I wouldn’t mind receiving every minute detail, a group from whom I’d like to receive less detail and people I don’t want to hear about at all. I really need to play around with the friend grouping options to see if this is possible.

i don’t do twitter and i don’t really care about that many real time updates from people…and even if i did it all looks the same. i use the “status” often enough, but updating 3-4x a day? wtf who cares what you’re doing!? (this might not be “new facebook” related, i realize.) i agree with the above – the right and left columns look like ads. i don’t use them to sort and i don’t click or even read there ever.

i liked when my status was bold/different from wall posts. i don’t see why i need to know on my page, your page, the home page, etc. what is going on, who is chatting/pointing at whom, and so on.

in my very basic opinion, i don’t like it because i don’t see what benefits they are providing by changing things up again. but i won’t be signing any petitions or creating a bring back the old old facebook group anytime soon :)

The overall layout is fine and the real-time-ness behind it is solid. The actual execution is underwhelming. Their hierarchy sucks—nothing stands out and everything in the far-right column looks like a crappy ad. The previous iteration of the News Feed did a better job of differentiating between the types of stories it presented. Maybe this is all intentional and they believe everything should have the same weight (that would be stupid). I think it’s probably more likely that this is just the latest example of their struggles with navigation and information design. They’ve never figured out how to use their colors and all their whitespace, both of which have the potential to be kickass.

I haven’t really screwed around with the filters yet but I wish there was a way to feature story types (especially in the “Highlights”) I care about more—a la the sliders from the previous version. I would love to see a half-size/collapsed view cribbed from the Gawker story and comment systems.

And speaking of those filter tabs on the left: Some mighty strange apps are showing up for me, ones that I don’t use, like “Which mighty woman of the Bible are you most like?”