As everyone knows, Facebook is a social networking website that has millions of users scattered all over the world. This website started its operation in the year 2004 and it quickly becomes a big hit to people everywhere. Currently, Facebook is estimated to have more than 800 million users around the world. The number could have easily reach 1 billion if not because of several countries that block Facebook to its people. There are currently 6 countries that block Facebook which are Bangladesh, China, Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
During the 7 years that Facebook has been available to the public, it has been evolving at a pretty constant pace, and almost all of the changes bring negative reviews from the users. The first redesign was in September 2006, where Facebook introduces News Feed, a feature that displayed all of your friends’ activity in a single element. This major redesign cause great displeasure to users who are concerned about their privacy but still, the number of new users still increases day by day.
Two years later, Facebook makes a major reconstruction of its layout, where the developers have separated different areas of the website to different tabs. The outcry from this redesign reach hundreds of thousands and sensing the unrest from the users, Facebook changed their design but still implement the tabs to the left side of the screen, known as the sidebar. This feature is still available today.
In March 2009, status updates are being changed so that it can operate more efficiently and faster. This is to keep the competition with its fierce rival, Twitter. A few months later, the status updates is again redesigned. This time, Facebook developers tweaked a bit of its algorithm to determine which status updates is more popular than the others.
Now (September 2011), Facebook did it again and the layout of the website is again being reconstructed. This time, two new features are being embedded into Facebook. The first one is Timeline where users will be able to see anything shared by other users during a specific time. Another one is the Ticker, which is regarded as a revolutionary feature that separates Facebook from its competitors. This feature is a constantly updating stream of posts that publishes anything that your friends do.
For now, these two new features are taken with a bit of salt by the users. The users have been expressing their criticism everywhere but Facebook is not known to be tolerable to their users. This is all because Facebook is known as a must to everyone nowadays and if you do not have a Facebook account, you can be regarded as someone that is technologically-illiterate.
Whether you like it or not, these changes are just the beginning and Facebook users will have to prepare for more major changes – perhaps the most dramatic changes since the launch of Google+.
