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Last night, Facebook responded to the outcry from over a million of its users.  The outcry came from Facebook‘s redesign of user pages and the response from Facebook aims to ease things up as regular users found the new look “too busy” and impersonal.

Facebook speaks

“Whenever we build something new or tweak something old, our motivation is the same: to help you share with the people you care about and find out what’s happening with them,” wrote Christopher Cox, Facebook’s Director of Product.  Cox’s blog post aimed to convey they are focusing on fixing three things:

• Add more control and relevance
• See more highlights
• Find things more easily

Users speak

This post, much like the redesign, was met with skepticism.  From the blog post comments:

• “i really hate this new layout and would like you to replace the previous one please”
• “All my friends I talk to in person say they don’t like it anymore and don’t want to us it.”
• “you might think this is much finer, but none of my ole high school friends like it one little bit. In fact we were thinking to take our 250 group away elsewhere.”
• “New FB? u suck…”

For Facebook the gamble is leave it as is to compete with the likes of Twitter and risk losing users to MySpace (dear God!) or offer a way to change back for users that choose to do so.  It looks like the Facebook team is scrambling to allow users to customize a bit more, but how many of their users are going to take the time to muck around in settings? 

1% Protest

At the end of the day the choice becomes upsetting 1.7 million users (those who signed the petition going around) vs. the other 175 million users that are not agitated enough to protest.  If I were betting, I’d say they are going to stick to the new design.  What do you say?

Read [Facebook]