Facebook Should Follow Twitter

Twitter's new user homepage

Earlier today Twitter announced that they were on the verge of releasing an all new Twitter experience. If you’d like to read more about it go to Twitter’s homepage . In a nutshell this overhaul brings in features like tabbed browsing (through the feed, mentions, retweets, etc), videos and pictures directly in your feed, mini profiles, and more. It is a completely new way to Tweet, Follow, and is an incredible update that I predict, and in agreement with Mashable’s recent post on the subject, will make the website insanely more popular and easily monetized for businesses.

This is how you will view Twitter vids and pics in the feed...live.

That’s not what this post is about. This post is about how Facebook should “follow” (get it?) in Twitter’s footsteps about how to update/change a website layout, and functionality. Facebook has angered plenty of people with their somewhat frequent home page, profile, and news feed changes over the years…I myself have been very angry about this since Facebook hasn’t even perfected basic features on their site such as Search and Chat. Why update things without warning, angering your users (aka your monetary value), without fixing the things that actually need fixing?

Twitter is doing something extraordinary when you compare the process to Facebook’s lack of notifications, customer service habits, and apparent lack of hearing when it comes to user feedback. Twitter is slowly rolling out the new website in a preview mode that will allow all users to switch back and forth between the old and new sites at will. This will allow users to get accustomed to the features and layout of the new site at their own pace. Eventually everyone will only have access to the new site…but at least Twitter is doing what Facebook has never done, letting users know what’s happening well before it happens. Maybe they learned a few things from Facebook’s mistakes as well. It always sucks being the big man on campus when trying new things doesn’t it FB?