The New Face of Facebook

INTERNET socialites ought to prepare themselves: Facebook has changed again.

As of last week, the online home to 175 million people will look very different as the social networking site again revamps its home page, with a live news stream and friend "filters".

Facebook's move is an obvious reaction to the booming popularity of micro-blogging site Twitter and an attempt to keep its membership growing at five million users weekly.

But there is still doubt about whether users will be wooed by the facelift, or whether any of the competing websites will survive when all are yet to becpme profitable.

Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the latest changes last week, saying the alterations were not "something we've been working on for a long time", but a response to the increasing amount of information hosted on the site.

Mr Zuckerberg also warns this redesign will not be the final Facebook facelift.

-----------------------

What's changed?

The main change to the new-look Facebook will be a feature called the Stream. Replacing the News Feed introduced in 2006, the Stream will show the updates your friends make in real-time, giving the site an immediacy similar to Twitter.

Mr Zuckerberg says the Stream's addition will accelerate the pace of updates, bringing members to Facebook to "consume and participate in the stream itself" rather than looking for just one type of content, such as status updates.

Facebook will also add Filters so users can categorise contacts: by family, friends, school mates and colleagues, for example.

Also, new profiles will be added for use by companies and public figures. Famous Facebookers including US President Barack Obama, cyclist Lance Armstrong, swimmer Michael Phelps, band U2 and TV news network CNN have already signed up to use these new profiles that will put their updates alongside those of your close friends.

"This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe," Mr Zuckerberg says.

 

-----------------------------------

Twitter risks

Several of these additions to Facebook mimic behaviour already seen on Twitter. Even some of Facebook's new public figures, including Armstrong, are prolific Twitter users.

Twitter chief executive Evan Williams has gone out of his way to make some of these high-profile users welcome on Twitter, preventing web-savvy users from cyber-sitting on their famous names.

Celebrities including Demi Moore appear to appreciate this approach. The actress last week pledged her allegiance to the micro-blogging site online, saying: "Facebook is cool, but Twitter is the s- - -."

Deakin University communications and social media lecturer Ross Monaghan says this could be due to Twitter's design that allows users to participate in conversations, rather than sharing personal photo albums, applications, surveys and other information.

Mr Monaghan says the two warring sites are fundamentally different and Facebook's administrators need to be careful about changing their winning ways too much.

"Whatever Facebook does they need to be very, very careful that they don't alienate the existing users and they don't change what seems to be a winning formula so far," he says.

Mr Monaghan says rather than encouraging users to choose just one social networking avenue, enlightened internet users are likely to use two or three, maintaining different profiles for different communication.

Ultimately, though, both could disappear. Neither Facebook nor Twitter is profitable yet and while speculation mounts that Google could buy Twitter, and both continue to attract users, neither have a successful business model.

Mr Monaghan says far from crowning a winner, users should prepare for a day without the current social networking sites.

"The world wide web is coming up to its 16th birthday, which is an incredibly young age ... I think we're going to see incredible changes yet and it's far too early to say that anyone is a winner. We're not even halfway through round one," he says.