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By Jon M. Cohen – New Media Specialist

By now you must have seen the changes that have taken place on your home page on Facebook. I  have heard the uproar from the community about how ugly it is and how hard it is to use. So let’s set aside all the complaints, sit back and look at why this change was needed and what will be the long term gain to the Facebook user lover.

It should be noted that every 6 to 9 months the good people at Facebook have felt the need to change the look and feel of this amazingly popular website. The last change we saw only affected the design and the look. This time  in addition to the look and feel, Facebook has cleverly changed some of the functionalities, including the change to the home landing page and to the user’s personal page. You may ask why they would make the change besides wanting to piss off more than two million users. Well my smart-ass answer can be summed up in one word, “Darwinism.”Yes that’s right, these changes are meant as a form of evolution. Remember only the strong survive and  when the owners of Facebook were not able to purchase their biggest competitor they needed to adjust the Facebook site to compete with and offer similar functions.

I assume you have heard  of Twitter  but just in case it is a social networking site that features “micro-blogging.” Twitter has really tipped in the last few months and with celebrities like Shaquille O’Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Jimmy Fallon, and Britney Spears it is no surprise that more and more of mainstream web users are really giving it a go. As a result, Facebook needed to make some major changes to its systems. Granted,  Twitter only has 300,000 users which is a small user base when compared to Facebook. The truth of the matter is that Twitter is a real threat to Facebook. Twitter’s 140 character “Tweets” can easily be compared to  Facebook’s status update section and so it was an easy choice for the Facebook team to change that status update to “what’s on your mind?” Now with these basic functionality changes and a redesigned home page (that looks a lot like the Twitter home page) Facebook can start to roll out some of the same functions that Twitter currently offers. Let’s face it, Twitter is where the web is going so if Facebook can grab the audience then it will insure a long life  as a social networking website. Therefore in the long run, users will actually gain functionality by these changes. We will still see some minor changes to Facebook in the months to come. One change  to look for is the removal of the “Friends” cap, which is currently sitting at a maximum of 5000 friends. Going forward users will be able to have over 100,000 friends on Facebook.

I leave you with this final thought, if printers and scanners can join to become an all-in-one printer, why not try to use the new Facebook and empower yourself to see all that social networking and “micro-blogging” have to offer. You may be surprised by the outcome. Feel free to follow me on Twitter, CLICK HERE