I totally agree with you and a lot of the anger comes from laziness. I think if my first experience with FB was today I’d love it. It makes sense, I get what I want and I can see/filter/respond to everything I want to easily.

I’m totally with you on all your points.

Great post. You bring up some points that I’ve been arguing for a while about Facebook. As a designer, I think the new Facebook is a big improvement. I would argue that many users don’t appreciate the change, because they don’t understand the reasoning behind it. If the creators of Facebook were able to sit down one on one, they might be able to swing some votes.

But the fact of the matter is, Facebook is largely a mindless application. You login and go through the same motions every week/day/hour, depending on how hard core you use it (my sister logs on at least 5 times a day). So, when you login one day and go through the usual motions, but experience different results, it gets frustrating. The main issue is that people don’t like to read or do work when it comes to the internet. If it takes more than a click or two a lot of people give up.

To give Facebook some credit, they gave plenty of warning ahead of time, and with the previous redesigns being far more drastic than this one, they allowed users to actually test drive the new layout before it was released.

Great post, love the connections you made here.