Mevio Tech

Beware, all ye Facebook-friendly fans of free social networking!  Just when you thought you’d mastered your News Feed and harnessed your favorite friends into one, easy-to-view filter, Facebook is here to keep you on your toes yet again…

Behold! The New Facebook Redesign!:

Mashable (among many) reports that the redesign has not officially been announce and that a “confidential” document was leaked earlier this morning.  Gotta love the power of the Internet, eh?

The big features that Facebook is unveiling have mostly to do with it’s recent acquistion of FriendFeed.  They wasted no time in putting their talent to work…and it shows.

Facebook users will now have the option of quickly switching back and forth between Top News items and a Recent Activity view.  It’s meant to personalize the experience of the Facebook Home Page further by filtering out the less “important” or popular news items.

But how will Facebook calculate which posts are more important than others?  When Facebook starts using AI to judge what I want to see in my News Feed, things are starting to get a little scary.  And if you’re a Facebook addict like me, I will generally sift through the entire News Feed until I see a post that I recognize from the last time I logged on (which, admittedly, doesn’t take very long).

Another feature of the new Facebook is the reintegration of certain personal information that users complained about losing in the last update.

From Facebook’s document:

“Facebook has also put information back into the stream that people have asked for, including photo tags, friend acceptances, relationships, Event RSVPs and group memberships. In addition, birthdays are now viewable above the fold.”

I’d actually forgotten that some of those things had gone missing, so I’m curious to see how well they are able to integrate them back into the system.

Groups and Pages are also getting a refresh.  Check out the so-called “confidential” redesign document below for all the gory details.

Facebook Document on Homepage Redesign

On the Tech 5 Top Five countdown John C Dvorak reports on keeping it in the family at Twitter, asks why Palm are keeping tabs on their users and why women are the key to the ebooks success. He also reveals who are friends with Facebook this week and who Nokia are connecting with.

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There are an insane amount of websites out there and it’s pretty much impossible to get through all them. Let alone find a site you actually like and plan on going back to anytime soon. Carlos and Neha weed through all the ’stuff’ out there and this week they bring you 4 sites with a little bit of everything. From a Twitter interface to a website selling toys and collectibles.