Facebook - For such an ugly website....

Is it only me who sees the new facebook profiles being introduced over the past week or so and looks away in disgust? Maybe I'm just awfully shallow? There seems to be an information overload... as if they want to shove everything about this person in your face. Should they abandon it for a more minimalist design though? It worked when Google made chrome, cutting out the million bars of rubbish IE seems to build up above the content of the actual page you are trying to look at.

Facebook has never really been a good looking beast, yet it's the most popular social network in the world today. What does this say about us? We lived through the windows 98 ugliness and now we are going back, smiling... Are we crazy?


MySpace has recently gone through a massive aesthetic tune up, as you may well have noticed if you delve into such sites from time to time. I think it worked well for MySpace, it made a site that seemed to have been static as square for years into something hip and slick. Could facebook do the same? Why haven't they already?

I think it is largely a matter of facebook's trademark look. If they were suddenly go all visa on us then it would change our ideas of facebook, and people who knew facebook would have to rethink it, which could result in less visitors, which could result in less profit. The old saying goes that if something works then it shouldn't be fixed, and I suppose facebook certainly gets by as it is.

Who knows what the future holds for faceook's front end? Over the past few years it has shown some signs of trying to improve... but have they been enough? What is your opinion on the way facebook looks? How would you redesign it if you had the chance?

George Maier