After a long meeting with my colleagues last night at about 10:35PM, I went on Facebook.  As usual, I did a status-update-checking routine on the homepage, scrolled up and down the page some more and finally clicked on the Friends link up top.  Then I paused.

Instead of finding a list of recent status updates, I was greeted by a brand-new “Find your friends” page.  Hmm…  I’ve been a Facebook user for over four years now, so I’m not really here to add more friends.  What about that list of status updates I was here for?

Slightly confused (but hopeful), I clicked around some more on the left sub-navigation bar from “All Friends” to “Browse” to “Phonebook” and finally “Recently Added”, but still no status updates.  After clicking a while and seeing the same pages I realized that they’ve taken that nifty feature out.

Yeah, no more ability to easily find which one of my friends have just updated their profile.  Is that annoying or what?  And I’m definitely not the only one who feel this way.

I wouldn’t consider myself a die-hard Facebook user (like some of you with hundreds of applications installed), since I use Facebook just to stay updated with what’s new with my friends.  Usually the chain of  tasks that I perform is very similar to this:

1. Look around homepage for friends’ status updates
2. Go to Friends Page to find out who’s updated their status updates
3. Stay on Friends Page and check who’s updated their profile pages (photos, notes, pages, status, relationship status. etc.)
4. Click on friend’s profile page if I’m interested enough
5. Rinse #1 and repeat for the next hour or so

As you can see, about 95% of the time on Facebook I spend checking people’s updates.  Now with this new change, what’s left to do?

Sure the homepage gives you a little highlight of what your friends are doing, but it’s also overfilled with chains of conversation by people I am not friends with, or those strange quizzes people take.

I’m not really sure how a decision like this came about (a victim of design by committee perhaps?), but I think it really is taking a HUGE step backwards from what Facebook should be: a social networking site where everyone is connected with each other.  After all, that social networking aspect of keeping in touch with what’s new with your friends is what makes Facebook so… addicting (at least for me).  And now they’ve taken that out completely.

Am I annoyed?  Yeah, a little, probably because now I’ll have to figure out what to do with my spare time.  For the past few days, my number of visits to Facebook certainly has decreased at least by half, mainly because I realize I can’t check the new stuff.  But maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, I could be working on other stuff (like working on my beach bod for the summer) instead of spending hours on Facebook.

What do you think about the new Friends page?