An efficient Facebook homepage
After 2007, Facebook started screwing up their homepage. Since then, the best move they’ve made, from a design point of view, is to make the page wider. Even so, the layout isn’t optimized.
For example, currently, on the left column, nothing is happening under the filter list. White space can be powerful in design or it can be wasted as it is in this case. The second column is just the feed. It’s fine as it is for now.
The last column is filled with various types of information and they are all displayed in the wrong order. Wrong means that the objective is to make money also known as making people hate Facebook rather than to make people praise Facebook for whatever relevance it could possibly have.
The first item of that column is the number of requests. First has also been synonymous to “very important”. The thing is that there’s absolutely nothing important about invitations to useless applications, groups, events and pages. Especially events where you’re just one of hundreds and thousands of guests who were just checkboxes to the people who sent the invitation. If anyone really wants you anywhere, they’ll invite through much more personal behaviours.
The second item is the Suggestion box. I have always thought that, on Facebook, the word Friends should be replaced with Acquaintances. Most suggestions are about acquaintances with whom you haven’t been in touch for a while or about a Page that a friend has become a fan of. I find that when you’re really a fan of something, you’ll make the effort yourself to find that page and click on “Become a fan”. As for reconnecting with “friends”, the suggested people are pretty much people who are in your list for professional reasons.
The third item is the Sponsored box. I don’t have to explain this, nobody wants it.
Now, we get to the fourth item. The Event box. This is the single most important item of that column and Facebook decided to put it in fourth position. It’s a terrible place, because you have to scroll to see everything. Furthermore, none of the events are really more important than birthdays and yet, these are at the bottom. This entire box should be moved up.
The last item is for connecting with friends. For all I care, this one can stay where it is or be removed.
So Facebook’s homepage is flawed and you can hope that the next update will be better or you can complain that it sucks. There is a third option which is change it yourself. All you need is to use Google Chrome and install Facebook Fixer and Events at top. Facebook Fixer will be accessible through the Settings on Facebook. This script has many options and one possible result is what you see below.
I am suggesting Google Chrome as a browser because it’s pretty much the fastest that currently exists and it natively supports the installation of scripts. With Safari and Firefox, you will need GreaseKit and Greasemonkey, respectively.
If you want to dig a little deeper in the world of scripts, you’ll find that you can do much more, like remove ads for almost every websites and change the appearance of every single websites.
