Facebook Redesign & New Job

Yesterday, the Facebook launched a redesign of their site that included two new features -- News Feeds and Mini Feeds.

In short, I thought the features were absolutely brilliant.

Ever since I graduated college (2002), I've basically had one overarching goal around computers and technology -- figuring out ways to help people maintain and grow interpersonal relationships.  The impetus is fairly obvious -- at college, I was surrounded by some of the most amazing, kindest, and most brilliant folks in the world, and I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose that once I left.

Every so often at Microsoft, a group of folks are asked to come together as a group and pitch an idea to execs.  About three years ago (and again two years ago), I gave basically the same pitch -- I had a friend in college (Al Cho) who was basically the nicest person I've ever met.  Once we graduated, I largely lost contact with him.  I'd get periodic snapshots of where he was (studying at Oxford, working at the U.N., etc.), but I'd lost a recurring touch.  I wanted an app that helped me keep track of all my friends in one place.  It would have blogging, photo sharing, friend-of-friend, events, mobile phone integration, maps integration (e.g., see all friends in a certain area if you're traveling ...), etc.

Friendster had some of that a few years ago, but it was painfully slow, etc.  And then Friendster slowly atrophied.  I think people just stopped having a reason to come back once it lost its novelty.  But that's because Friendster missed the ball -- it's about your friends' lives, stupid.  It's about keeping in touch and seeing what's changing.  They didn't really optimize for that (they felt like they were primarily about search at first).

About two months ago, I was chatting with Nick Murphy and I observed that the real killer feature for MySpace or Facebook would be a personal RSS feed that was a changelist for all your friends.  Ultimately, you could track what's going on with your friends in Safari, in Outlook, on your phone, etc.  It would be brilliant.

Then, this week, Facebook added essentially that feature.  IMHO, I mean, Facebook has got a lot of stuff going for them.  Elegant interface.  Photo sharing and tagging is really quite nice.  Blogging / notes is a little weak, but ok.  They have a developer platform (brilliant -- kudos Fetterman).  And now they have a feed that helps you keep track of your friends and what they're doing.  (They still need to make it RSS, though.)

All-in-all, I think it's great.  Kudos.

(Of course, it's funny -- there also seems to be a huge backlash against the new site and the new features.  I was a little surprised.  Presumably if they just change the defaults to only publish certain things by default (new photos, new notes, new walls) and not other things (relationship status, etc.), people will be ok.)

On an unrelated note, I haven't blogged about Indigo (er, the Windows Communication Foundation) in a while.  That's due, in part, to the fact that I've moved from being a producer to being a consumer of WCF.  I've moved from being a PM on the WCF team to being a developer on the some of the backend infrastructure for Windows Live.  My infrequent blog posts will probably slowly migrate from stuff like WS-Addressing to Amazon and Google.  We'll see.