Facebook today is beginning to roll out a redesign aimed at simplifying the site and giving users more control over their profiles. The new version of the site has been in the works for some time now, and Ars Technica went hands-on to see how social and private the new design really is.
Announced in a press release, Facebook's new design is slowly being rolled out to its 80 million users over the next few days. If you can't wait to check it out for yourself, though, you can visit www.new.facebook.com with a registered account to gain access now.
Upon entering the new Facebook homepage, it's clear that the aggregate life stream is now more of a king than ever. The Home, Profile, and Friends pages have been cleaned up to place a much greater focus on activity streams, à la FriendFeed. A new visual preference panel highlights some of the greater control Facebook is offering, as it displays analog-style sliders for adjusting the priority of content from friends like wall posts, relationships, notes, status, and more.
Facebook's personal profile page has a much more straightforward layout, and it finally brings some order to applications that frequently took over a user's profile. With this increased focus on letting users publish and import content to their Wall, applications have been separated out to an area called "Boxes," but also granted more power to integrate with a user's profile—if the user approves it. A new tab bar at the top of a user's profile allows for adding frequently-used applications, while the Wall area now specializes in the content that a user chooses to publish to his or her feed.
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