Analyzing Facebook’s New Layout

As we mentioned in this morning’s Reputation Management, Internet Privacy, and Social Media Quick Hits, Facebook is in the process of rolling out a new design change. As with all things involving Facebook, there has been a mix of excitement and revulsion from users over the new look. Of course, when you have more than 350 million people to consider, there’s no way you can please everybody.

Anyway, we thought we would take some time to look over the changes and point out any potential privacy problems that we notice. Since the rollout has only affected a small number of users so far (my profile hasn’t changed yet), we are turning to TechCrunch, who themselves are using screen caps sent in by readers.

Here’s a look at the main profile page thanks to Laura Watkins. To see a larger version, click on the image.

One of the big and most noticeable changes right off the bat is the prominence of the search bar. Rather than being tucked to the right-top of the profile, it is now positioned more toward the middle of the page, just above the News Feed. I would surmise that this is an effort on Facebook’s part to make search more accessible to users as part of a greater effort to make Facebook the central hub on the web for a user accessing information.

Other noteworthy design changes include moving the notification icon from the lower right hand corner of your Facebook profile to the upper left hand corner. The icon, which is now a globe instead of a signpost, is situated to the right of the Facebook logo alongside icons for messages and outstanding requests for applications and groups.

Beyond those logical changes, Facebook has redesigned how some of the most common features of Facebook (such as pictures and videos) are accessed and displayed. As shown in this image from Matthew Sanders, who has numerous other images of Facebook’s new look at his Posterous blog, when a user goes to open their images, they are displayed in a Dashboard format.

The idea of using dashboards is not new to Facebook (this feature is in place when you click on the photos icon at the lower left hand corner of the Facebook homepage), but making photos open like this from the left hand column is much more logical and efficient than the often indecipherable “News Feed” approach.

Thus far, it appears that there’s nothing egregiously terrible about Facebook’s changes from either a design or privacy perspective. The one problem that we mentioned in Quick Hits was that users can view their friends’ application activity by going to the Apps Preview dashboard. Considering there are some applications that users would rather keep under wraps, Facebook needs to provide an effective tool for hiding application activity from friends.

What do you think of Facebook’s new look? Have you seen it on your profile yet?