Facebook is getting a restyle: will it be worth it?
Restyle for Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg would like Facebook to make much more ‘cultural influence’. And not in the politically disruptive Cambridge Analytica way, but in a positive way. To do that, something has to change. It wants to help users of the social medium with a kind of big clean-up of Facebook. And that means it will likely become significantly more like Instagram. For example, it wants to change how you interact with photos in your feed and how you see them. It all has to be considerably simpler and more compelling. That’s simpler; we can make a good living there. Anyone who has ever wanted to do something on Facebook will soon end up in a kind of jungle of menu after menu, then a separate suite for ‘business’ Facebook: menu options on the left, at the top, it occasionally goes in all directions, while it all has approximately the same colors and design, so that one menu option actually looks the same as the other. Meta also promises a menu redesign: finally.
A simpler Facebook
Facebook will provide people who post multiple photos at once with a new kind of grid. People can like the photos by tapping them twice. This also concerns Stories in the restyle: you can now find options to enhance your Stories with music and tagging friends more easily. Search results will also be expanded, and you will soon be able to see all kinds of different content types in Facebook’s search function. And this is a charming addition: Meta wants to let you view photos and videos in full-screen mode without losing what you were doing before. Responding to other people’s posts is also simplified, and that’s where Facebook becomes a lot like Instagram. It is still scrolling, but different from before: it seems more about the content than the reactions. Meta wants to make Facebook more straightforward to use, but the question is whether this will harm the fingers of its other social media platforms too much. And on Facebook, many people who still have Facebook spend more time on Instagram. But since Instagram is already Instagram and many people have already left Facebook, it does not seem logical that people would return to the blue social medium.
A comeback?
The bottom line is that it may be too late for Facebook: people have already moved on with their lives; They no longer post their plate of Brussels sprouts on Facebook, they did that on Instagram for a while before they realised that they can also post many more other pictures – and even better, videos – on Instagram. There isn’t that much urgency to return to Facebook. Plus, if Meta does it because it gives the people who still use Facebook a more pleasant experience, is it smart to choose something that looks so similar to Instagram? Does it listen to what the people who use Facebook actually still like about Facebook? If we ask AI, the answer is that people are mainly there for the neighbourhood groups, and whether they will benefit from things changing later, especially as Meta plans, remains to be seen. How positive it is that Facebook is going to change, how curious we are whether it can succeed, or whether we will, together with Meta, conclude that it is really too late.