Los Angeles — Over the course of recent developments in the social sphere, prominent social media outfit Facebook has covertly pushed out larger users’ profile photos so they appear more pronounced, just days after Google+ did the same.
Curiously though, the update is only for Facebook Timeline for profiles, and prior to Facebook’s soundless update, a photo measured 130 x 125 pixels, which now enlarges the size of a users’ profile picture and will overlay the user’s Timeline Cover image, a move that comes just days after Google updated Google+ profiles to sport a larger photo.
Well, the enhancement will now certainly see the pixel count rise to 166 x 160, quite a bit larger than previous size of pixels, according to The Next Web.
The image above is still a preview of your full profile picture, which can be viewed in full when you click on it. Besides, this makes the image more prominent but it also takes up more of a user’s Timeline Cover, which will impact those that have uploaded a custom Cover that incorporates the profile image into it.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the social media giant had made profile photos bigger but did not disclosed any further information to CNET as to why it made the change.
The move is likely to appease some users because their profile photos are now much noticeable within their Timeline Cover images. Regardless of the reason, will such a subtle change actually turn your overall user experience into one that is more friendly, or easier on the eyes.
In fact, a quick run of Facebook’s own Facebook Page reveals that Pages have not gotten a larger profile picture yet. This concludes that this is a direct reaction to the Google+ update: if Facebook was planning this change all along, the company would have included it when it pushed out Timeline to all Facebook Pages at the end of last month.
Nevertheless, Facebook has recently been introducing a series of changes over the last couple of weeks, such as merging e-mail addresses and Timeline URLs and providing users a tool to download the information they have archived on their profile, hence, it seems that the “quiet” changes often weave their magic into our consciousness without us realizing it, and that alone is not necessarily a bad thing.
Moving forward, this covert move comes on the heels of Google+ making users’ profile photos larger. In its redesign, Google+ riffed off Facebook’s concept of a cover image and now it seems like Facebook might be copying Google+ back with bigger profile photos.