This year, the big event in Facebookland will be the launch of a wider and smarter tabbed Profile page. It's "aimed at making things simpler, cleaner, and more relevant, while still giving you control over your own profile," says the official preview page.
It seems the main change will be to move application profile boxes off the user's main profile page, by default. With thousands of apps around, this will immediately decrease clutter and improve load times, but also make it harder for developers to get their apps to "go viral". This seems to me a Good Thing. Users will also get more control over feeds via a new Feed Wall; ditto.
Facebook trailed the changes back in February, and yesterday published details for developers. The Developers blog said:
Now we're ready to start giving you as many details on the new features as we can so you can prepare to fully integrate your applications into the new design. Along with the new profiles, we are also launching improvements to Feed and Wall, as well as making some changes to streamline the application installation flow.
It also promised a beta test site later this month.
Inside Facebook, an independent blog, has talked to "Ruchi Sanghvi and Josh Elman, Product Managers of the Facebook Platform and leads on the profile redesign effort" to provide more details.
Any thoughts? Or is Facebook last year's news?
