Facebook’s New Look.. Does It Work?

I wake up this morning and what do you know, Facebook has a new look. Yes, you can choose to switch back and forth from it to check it out. At least they are giving users a choice this time, seems they are learning from the whole Beacon fiasco.

The new looks is clean and sleek, as they are adopting more and more AJAX. They are, however, running into a problem that I see with a lot of sites that go heavy with AJAX. Because AJAX can give you such a clean look, folks tend to over do it. Facebook seems to be no different as it appears that they may have deconstructed the content a little too much, nothing a few focus groups won’t fix. By over organizing the content, they have made it a little harder to use. They have trained thier users to browse and interact with their content in a certain manner and now they seem to be changing that whole paradigm. This will meet with some resistance. If they can pull it back just a little, all in all this may be a good move for them.

In the end, Facebook is a business that although has been valuated at around 15 billion dollars, generates nowhere near that much revenue. With designing the new look like they have they have made the whole right side of the screen space available to place ads. This to me is very obtrusive, the ads are just to big and they just seem like they don’t belong. Facebook wants to create an ad platform that can generate revenue like Google does, but the difference is that Google’s business model is different and user interact with thier content differently. When folks do a search, its usually quick as they search for content so even though ads appear its not prolonged exposure to them. With Facebook on the other hand, users spend longer stints of time at their sight and having to stare at a huge ad the whole time I am on there is really annoying.

There is a way to make the ads work and still be unintrusive, not sure what that is but there is. For instance, make the ads come up when I click something such as a book title in my favorite book to see who else likes the book you could show me all the people who have that same book as a favorite, but then you could show me places I could buy that book and point me to it. That would be helpful, I could appreciate that. If 10 of my friends install the Facebook for iPhone application and you show me an ad for the iPhone that may not be annoying because it is in someway relevant to me, but an add telling me to sign up for some erroneous online school which has no relevance to me is just annoying.

The folks at FB are smart, they will figure out. To many ads, to obtrusively placed will annoy your users to no end. Basically, what I am saying is they have to find a better way to place ads that is more conducive to how their users interact with their data. What do you guys think?