Tonight on 60 Minutes, Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team officially announced the launch of the New Profile Page and provided some insight into the direction and next steps for Facebook.
The new design of the Facebook Profile Page, which users are now able to opt-in to, prominently features user’s photos, friends and relationships, and demonstrates Facebook’s ultimate desire to truly tell each user’s story.
While the new Profile Pages offer a wide variety of interesting changes, one of the most blatant additions is the inclusion of a short summary of each user’s identity at the top of their profile page. The summary includes employment and education information, each user’s current city and hometown, and their birthday, providing users with an elevator pitch for each and every one of their Facebook friends.
The new Profile Page also features extremely graphical depictions of a user’s likes, interests and activities, and asks users to identify even more information about themselves in the form of their inspirations, favorite athletic teams, athletes and more. The Profile Page also allows users to publicly display the ways in which they have grouped their friends into lists, whether that be coworkers, family members, close friends, etc.
A third striking change to the Profile Page (which was not reported on in the 60 Minutes interview) is the increased real estate awarded to Facebook paid advertisements. In the new Profile Page, Facebook ads are considerably larger and much more visually striking. Facebook has been quiet on the topic, but it will be interesting to see if the larger size and deeper integration of paid advertisements within user’s walls will lead to more clicks and higher engagement levels for Facebook advertisements.
Old Facebook Paid Ads (left), New Facebook Paid Ads (right)
All-in-all, the goal of the new Profile Page is similar to that of the “See Friendship” pages, which were rolled out about a month ago. Facebook wants to tell your fully-fleshed out story. From your personal interests to the ways you interact with your friends, Facebook wants to help you write and record your autobiography in real-time.
As of now, Facebook Fan Pages have not been affected by the change in design. However, the new Profile Page features a similar design to existing Facebook Places Pages, and in order to maintain a uniform look and feel across all Facebook Pages, it is likely that Fan Pages will undergo a drastic redesign in the very near future as well.
The 60 Minutes interview briefly probed the Facebook team for information about the next steps for Facebook. The team reports that with over 200 million users now accessing Facebook from a mobile platform, mobile products are at the forefront of the Facebook engineers’ development efforts.
For more details, watch the full 60 Minutes interview with Mark Zuckerberg.
Comment below and let us know if you love the new Profile Page, hate it, or just don’t understand the change!
