Here’s how Zuckerberg is changing Facebook

22 August 20204 years ago babelfish

All the news of Facebook wanted by Zuckerberg in the deepening of the Agi

"The future is private". San Jose, California, April 2019. With these words Mark Zuckerberg, 37, announced to the world the first great social revolution he had founded 15 years earlier in his Stanford university room.

A new philosophy, more attentive to the private sphere, which would find shape in a new graphic layout. And here it is the "New Facebook", arrived in recent months for the mobile version, now available for everyone also in the desktop version. The first evidence is that the traditional blue of the search bar has given way to white (or black in a 'dark' version for energy saving). More legible fonts and more glossy icons. And lots of space for the functions that for Zuckerberg were fundamental for FB5, the fifth version of the platform.

“Great visibility has been given to the functions that he wants to use more at this time and that will become a source of income”, comments to Agi Vincenzo Cosenza, social media expert and curator of the Vincos.it blog. And they are those behind the four icons that today, in addition to the Home icon, make up the upper range of FB5: “The videos (Watch), the market (Marketplace), the groups (Groups) and the games (Games). Added to this are the stories that are well highlighted because there Facebook can find new space to insert advertisements from advertisers ”.

The very use of the social network seems to have changed, almost conveyed by the new structure. The eye is often captured by the video sections, groups and stories. A more intimate dimension induced by the new layout, which Menlo Park has been working on for years. When a social network decides to change, the logics that move properties and developers are so usability and lightness, but also commercial logics. “The problem with Facebook is that its advertising business is doing so well that the space available is decreasing,” explains Cosenza. "So there is a need to find new 'walls' on which to post the billboards". This explains the need to give importance to Stories and to the four social spaces within Facebook: games, groups, videos, market.

HOW A PLATFORM OF 3 BILLION USERS IS RE-DESIGNED

It took a long time and a lot of work. The redesign of the social network was long overdue. This does not mean that nothing has changed in recent years; Facebook is constantly evolving even if we don't notice it. Algorithms change, some small functions change, others have been added. But the old design of the social, known as 'Facebook Classic', seemed to be out of step with the sidebars and windows for the new services which made it rather clunky.

And it had to be redone without running the risk of confusing users: “It's not an easy job. First, hundreds of ideas are tested internally first. Then the best ones gradually become available to small groups of users to understand their reaction. Each interaction is recorded in order to understand what works and what is appreciated. Corrections are made to the case and proceed with other focused tests, until a satisfactory improvement is reached ”, explains Cosenza. Not everything happens in a short time, because redesigning a social network with billions of users is not just an aesthetic renewal: "We must always ensure that all the underlying services continue to function regularly".

Behind the Facebook revolution there was also the need to overcome the design of a site (Facebook.com) made with the programming language Html5, therefore designed for the web in 2011, to arrive at native applications for smartphones and tablets as it already is. they were Twitter or Snapchat. In 2012 the first steps, the first improvements, then the formalization of the project in 2018. Three parameters that should have guided the developers. FB5 had to be: fast, modern, interesting. This would have been achieved by overcoming the concept of the search bar at the top, with its classic blue color, condensed into a single function next to the social logo. No drop-down menus and only one color choice: white. To use the words of the social designer Dan Lebowitz released at Engadget: "The new white chrome is what allowed us to draw the attention of users to the things we wanted attention to be drawn to". That is, the four functions listed in the initial bar.

5 ICONS: THE NEW HEART OF FACEBOOK

And these icons, plus the Stories, are the heart of FB5.

HOME. By clicking on 'Home' you can access the classic News Feed, which however has less centrality now. While more space have the Stories, whose visibility has greatly increased. “Stories are now a widely cleared way of telling on Instagram, while on Facebook I notice less use”, comments Cosenza. “They are a way to easily and creatively tell a day of events using videos, photos, effects, texts. And they also disappear after 24 hours, so they give people more freedom of expression. I think they are destined to be used more and more. While the Reels (another function recently introduced, ed) are for now interpreted as simple short videos. In short, they have nothing of the TikTok videos ”, which also accused Facebook of having copied the idea of the Reels from the Bytedance social network.

VIDEO. Next to the Home button then there is the Watch button, with the video section. It is true that at the moment it is not clear how successful this function has, but the choice to put videos in the foreground demonstrates Facebook's intention to insist on these contents, evidently considered central to the future of social media. Both for the use that social networks make of it, and for what advertisers do with it.

STREET MARKET. And here we come to the third icon that redesigned the header of the new Facebook: the Marketplace. According to data from Menlo Park, most of the traffic on ecommerce comes from mobile, but few purchases are finalized via smartphone or tablet. Users prefer to do this via desktop, probably because they find it safer to buy via computer. It is clear that this function will have more and more sections and importance within the social.

GROUPS. Then there are the Groups, one of the vehicles of Facebook's new private sphere. Compared to before, Facebook has turned to small message boards of people who know each other personally or recognize each other for specific interests. A change in the use of social media that has seen an acceleration in recent years with the popularity achieved by platforms such as Reddit. Facebook, however, is even more used and this return to the group, to the forums, seems to be dictated by the need to live a more relaxed, familiar social environment than in the past.

GAMES. The last of the icons is for games. And in recent years they have started to become more and more popular on social media. Although gaming has always been central to the platform since Farmville and Candycrush. It has become and will become even more so. The company that said it has intensified more and more investments in the Facebook Gaming brand makes no secret of it.

The work seems to have satisfied the user base. According to Cosenza, net of some solvable imperfections, a good job was done: “I haven't heard any complaints around. Even if I have had some problems for example with the loading of some sections of my page or even with the direct. In short, there is probably still some bugs to be fixed ”.

There is time. The king of social networks knows that it is difficult for anyone to steal his scepter in the next few years.

(Extract from an article published on Agi, here the full version )

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/ecco-come-zuckerberg-sta-cambiando-facebook/ on Sat, 22 Aug 2020 04:59:34 +0000.