Facebook Redesigning Profile Page

Facebook is just full of announcements this week. Here's the latest, about redesigning the profiles. Some things could be very cool, like listen to the same music as your friend, which would require using the ticker and whatever music app your friend is using at the time. Likes, etc. will be in the ticker, not cluttering up the feed, but I plan to hide the annoying ticker, which I'm mostly ignoring now, anyway, so I'll miss out on all that. Still not sure how I feel about the new Timeline. I don't think of FB as a place for my life story. Really. That's not why I use FB. I use it to communicate with folks, play games, keep up with entertainment media and causes I'm interested in. I'm involved in too many other sites to want to give them up to put everything here. And I distrust using just one service for all, anyway.

The music thing, though, while cool, is irrelevant to me. I either have the TV or radio on when I'm online. Sometimes, late at night or at work, I use Pandora, which I adore. I can't see why I'd want to listen to music, or buy books, or do much else through FB. I'm not going to abandon sites I love just because FB added that functionality.

Facebook's new profiles are, in their words, going to be more visual. Big photo upfront as your "cover." More visual usually means less accessible to the visually impaired and blind users of a site. So, not a good thing in theory or in practice. It's alienating, even if there's enough text for them to access via a screen reader.

I want more functionality for Google+. I want more of my friends there and I want the causes and TV nets and the like there, too, with the equivalent of fan pages. I want the games I play on FB to be on G+, too. Then I would just need to check FB for the few folks who haven't made the move to G+.

~~~o0o~~~