Facebook is no short of ideas to revamp its social networking site and give it a look, no one would have ever thought of. Yesterday, it rolled out Ticker, its second News Feed, for everyone along with a few other minor but noticeable changes. Today we see that there are two major changes, one is the fixed navigation bar and the other is, an increase in the status update character limit. The fixed navigation bar was in news since the last week, when some techies had noticed it, but not many did know about it. However, the highlight here is the change in the character limit, which has been increased from 500 to 5,000, noted by Inside Facebook.
This character change widens the gap between a Twitter update and a Facebook update, as the former has its updates limited to just 140-characters. In case of Facebook, if one is still not satisfied with 5000 characters, they can always write a Facebook Note. Talking about the character limit for the status update, it seems to be an effective change which is an important dig from the social networking giant’s end to Google+, which places no character limit on posts. But most of the users have never appreciated long posts, which turn out to be boring at times, and after being on Twitter, short posts and updates are what users look at.
The other change one might notice is that the “What’s on your mind?” box on the News Feed has been removed. However, one can still notice it in their Facebook profile (Update Status is the default, though one can also choose to Add Photo). The News Feed would give you options to have a status update, along with options like Add Photo, or Ask Question for the box to appear.
Moreover, there were tests carried on last week, to give users an ability to edit bookmarks in the home page’s left navigation bar, and leave birthday greetings in a much more convenient way. If one likes using the ‘Poke’ option of Facebook, they might even notice that there has been an improvement rather in this case as it has been given a drop down menu. Again, a ‘not so important’ feature has been removed, which was to send a friend request with a message.
Facebook has always opted for the ‘test and then roll out’ strategy, but of late, many changes were pushed in a short period of time, which seems to have confused many users and for some, it left a bitter taste behind. For a stuffed review from the users, there were more haters, than lovers. Joy Behar of The Joy Behar Show fame was even in the ‘confused’ list and regretted her time spent on figuring out the new Facebook.
One can look out for the selected hate list here along with a few who really liked it. The link even has a question, which is worth thinking of, “Is Facebook trying to drive people to Google+?” This might be an option for those who do not appreciate the hard worked on Facebook changes. However, for the Facebook addicts, they like it or not, switching over from Facebook would never be an option as of now.