There has been a lot of coverage on how the recent Facebook redesign has annoyed the user-base, even in mainstream media like CNN.  Facebook has problems, but the biggest is this... I don't care.


Facebook's early culture before the days of the News Feed or multiple redesigns was vastly different. Facebook was like collecting baseball cards. Random people would meet me at a party or conference and later find me on Facebook. Since there was no real consequence, the friend number would tick up on my profile and I slowly amassed over 500 friends.

Then came Friendfeed and Twitter, intriguing web apps where you could track the every movement of your friends and colleagues - people you selected because you desire their thoughts. As these networks gained steam, Mark Zuckerburg decided that he wanted Facebook, and no other site, to be the center of people's online lives. So he turned Facebook into Friendfeed and Twitter, but there was a big problem...

All of the random people I met once? I do not care what they are eating right now. I don't care to see pictures of them and their "bros" beer pong tournaments, I don't care what their Top Five beers are, I don't care that they just bought tickets to Jonas Brothers 3D, and finally I don't care that they share characteristics with President Willard Filmore.

The newly enhanced filters address this issue, but it does not fix it or stop all of those random people from learning random information about me.

For advertisers and companies that are excited about the new way their updates can work their way into people's feeds, this is also not great news.  Will their messages get to ANY of their public effectively or get lost in the white noise of a thousand random people's updates?

The way to fix this issue is going through all my Facebook friends and deleting all the random people, but that is a lengthy process that causes more problems than it fixes. Even with an excuse of getting free Burger King, the old culture of "collecting Facebook baseball cards" is still there and deleting someone is the ultimate online slap in the face.

So what is the answer?

Facebook needs to decide what it is - a communications tool and directory of close friends or a bloated jack-of-all-trades, that is a master of none.

Wired.com has launched a sister site exclusively for the United Kingdom. Even though America and the UK speak the same language and are moving closer and closer culturally with the internet, there is still a market for UK only stories for our brothers and sister across the pond.

The design of the Wired.co.uk is still distinctly Wired, using their striking, yet simple boxy design that invokes the digital world of 0's and 1's.  The use of the complimentary blue and orange really pops for the eye and separates the UK version of the site from the original which prefers exclusive black and grays.

From a type standpoint, the site excels by using big sans-serif to attract users to the titles and serif for the article content. As most blogs lately use sans-serif site only, it is nice to see a site going with the more traditional sans-serif. It is much easier to read, even on screen.

The layout of the Wired.co.uk site packs a magazine's worth of articles on to the first page without being overkill.  Other technology blogs such as Engadget and Gizmodo use a long scrolling page of chronological posts.  To stick with its Magazine roots, Wired.co.uk's hompage is setup categorically. It is easy to find which articles are most popular.

The decision to arrange by category/popularity or by date is an important one. Even though blogs have pushed the "stream" design to the forefront, for sites that produce as much content as a Magazine or Newspaper, the categorical design is far more user-friendly. Imagine the NewYorkTimes.com setup like a blog? It would be overwhelming.