Facebook Profiles Get a Facelift

A large percentage of net users’ online identities will be getting a facelift in the coming weeks as Facebook is rolling out a new profile page with more visual elements and, you guessed it, more pictures of faces.
The new design is currently opt-in, but Facebook says it will roll it out to the world by early 2011. Those who want it immediately can go to the new profile explainer, which will walk you through the new pages and let you adopt it now. But be cautioned, there’s no undoing the choice.
The top of the page will now include a basic intro to a user, such as location, job, school, partner, etc. And directly underneath that is a bar of photos that you have been “tagged” in, increasing the number of pictures of the person’s face you see on the page. In fact, the photo algorithm doesn’t just show the photos you are tagged in, but zooms in on your face to make it fill the small square.
Here’s hoping you are ready for your close-up. You can choose to remove photos by clicking on them, and the option remains to “untag” yourself from any photo, no matter who took it.
Nearly everything on the page gets the same, more visual treatment.

You can now add lists of friends, such as “Roommates,” “Touch Football Teammates,” “Best Friends,” “College Buddies”. This is done using the recently revamped “Groups” function, and is clearly intended to get more people to create groups — perhaps as a pre-emptive strike on Google’s upcoming social network service, which is rumored to rely heavily on segmenting your friends into sub-groups.
You can also now “see friendship,” a feature that shows things you have in common with a given friend, including “mutual friends” and similar interests.
The change also makes Facebook’s ads more prominent on the page, with all four ad units being visible even on small laptops without having to scroll.
The change is in keeping with Mark Zuckerberg’s ardent belief that people are hard-wired to look at faces, so now the page will be filled with them. The new system also turns things you like, such as a band or a company, into an images. Clearly Facebook is learning from becoming the net’s largest photo sharing site that people like to look at pictures.
Facebook has also expanded the number of things you can share on the site, including classes you are taking at school, projects you are working on at your job, turning Facebook into a LinkedIn, Jr. for the internship set. In keeping with the post-literacy theme, these get the visual treatment as well.
Facebook users seem to be divided on the change, as you can read in the comments on the announcement, but for once, at least, there’s no real privacy issue, other than more people will be seeing more photos of you.
But the redesign does re-emphasize one thing: Facebook, not you, controls your online identity, and whether they like the redesign or not, hundreds of millions will accept it and use the service daily.