1. Last night Facebook unveiled another refresh of their layout, and like every reshuffling, the site feels a hair different and fresher — but something was missing and I couldn’t place what it was… Then it hit me. No “Update Status” Form. Wha-wha-whattt?  Yeah, the link is there, which reveals the form, and behaves the same way as Add Photo and Ask Question have for a little while, but I’m a little shocked the form is hidden by default. The most prominent place to input text now is directly into the search bar in the header, which visually jumps out at you with the familiar hypercontrasty white-box-on-blue-bar design. I’d be interested to see how this change affects users — specifically less savvy internet users who don’t know to look for / click a link to reveal a form.  This may seem like a small thing that people definitely would figure out, but I assume that Facebook users are among the most diverse group in terms of computer literacy of any site on the internet. The ReadWriteWeb Facebook Login debacle of February 2010 proved that a chunk of them can be easily confused — and they don’t like being confused.  I wonder whether this small change dramatically increases, decreases or has little effect on the amount of content that users upload from the feed page, and how that coincides with Facebook’s future strategy. I’m sure it’s a metric Facebook keeps track of.

    Last night Facebook unveiled another refresh of their layout, and like every reshuffling, the site feels a hair different and fresher — but something was missing and I couldn’t place what it was…

    Then it hit me. No “Update Status” Form.

    Wha-wha-whattt? 

    Yeah, the link is there, which reveals the form, and behaves the same way as Add Photo and Ask Question have for a little while, but I’m a little shocked the form is hidden by default.

    The most prominent place to input text now is directly into the search bar in the header, which visually jumps out at you with the familiar hypercontrasty white-box-on-blue-bar design.

    I’d be interested to see how this change affects users — specifically less savvy internet users who don’t know to look for / click a link to reveal a form. 

    This may seem like a small thing that people definitely would figure out, but I assume that Facebook users are among the most diverse group in terms of computer literacy of any site on the internet. The ReadWriteWeb Facebook Login debacle of February 2010 proved that a chunk of them can be easily confused — and they don’t like being confused. 

    I wonder whether this small change dramatically increases, decreases or has little effect on the amount of content that users upload from the feed page, and how that coincides with Facebook’s future strategy.

    I’m sure it’s a metric Facebook keeps track of.