Based on all the comments I have seen on Facebook this week, the Facebook community as a whole is upset about all the changes made to their homepage. I agree some of the changes don’t make sense, and usability was thrown out the window. I always wonder what companies are thinking when they make certain changes, especially those that appear so obvious to negatively impact usability and a users experience.

As much as we all may not like the new Facebook changes, I remember the same outpouring of anger from users the last time Facebook made changes. The negative comments soon quieted until the latest update. Granted this update seems much larger than last time and the users interface appears more affected. But if history is an indicator, the dissatisfaction will soon quiet down and it will be as if nothing changed. Besides, what are users going to do; go back to MySpace or Friendster? I think not.

We have to remember that Facebook has become a giant. It now accounts for approximately 25% of all pageviews in the USA (http://bit.ly/NQuYh).This is about 3 times that of Google. How many times a day do you, as a Facebook user, check your account compared to that of searching any of the search engines? Take a moment to really think about that fact and you can see how social media is quickly changing the online landscape.

So what does all this mean? Facebook uses their main site as a testing environment and has the greatest focus group on the planet (you, me and all of our Facebook friends). If users are really upset, they will stop using Facebook, or at least use it much less than they do today. The drop in users or page views is probably the only way that Facebook would consider rolling back or modifying some of the changes. In either case, I don’t expect that to happen, and in fact, with the amount of people putting comments about how they don’t like the changes, the number of visits and page views is increasing; exactly what Facebook wants.