Facebook Blinks. Where Did It Go Wrong, Exactly?

Did Facebook "surrender" its fight to sell recalcitrant users on a new site design, or is it just making "some minor modifications"? It depends on whom you ask.

According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, the social-networking site "cried uncle [yesterday] -- but just a teeny tiny little bit -- by announcing in a company blog that it had made tweaks to its recent redesign."

In that blog entry, product director Christopher Cox did indeed promise imminent changes to the new format that will grant the user more control over what appears in his or her "stream," the successor to the popular (although not at first) News Feed.

But Cox also took the opportunity to offer some self-justification: "Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see. We keep in mind that there are 175 million people on Facebook, and everyone uses the site differently."

That may be, but if there's one thing most of those 175 million seem to agree on, it's that Facebook's new iteration represents an overreaction to the growing popularity (or at least the growing buzziness) of Twitter. Media consultant Peter Feld thinks that Facebook was already striking approximately the right balance between the ephemeral and the enduring, while "Twitter, with its hash tags and @replies and RTs, is easily the social application most likely to look 'so 2008' in about three years."

Slate's Farhad Manjoo more or less disagrees, arguing that Facebook users will surely come around to the new format just as they've warmed to its previous innovations. (This although, as Manjoo notes, well over 90 percent of Facebook users who bothered to vote on the new design said they hated it.)

He thinks Facebook's blunder was essentially of a customer-relations nature:

About a week before the new site went into effect, Facebook put up a short note preparing users for coming changes. That was insufficient notice. A better approach would have allowed people to choose between the new site and the old one for a while; this would have let the company get feedback on the new site and fix what people hated about it before it rolled it out to everyone. It would also have given users a chance to get used to the new design before it became the default view. (In fact, Facebook did this for its last redesign; it's baffling why it didn't do the same this time.)