Frankly I find the new facebook design a major clean up and improvement, but facebook is run by kid who seem to have to learn the change lesson: slow change down over time to the UI.
This story from the BBC:
Just under a million people have now voted against changes to the social networking site Facebook.
I have tested these changes a lot and they are an improvement, but like Office 2007 they are not enough of an improvement to overcome established user bias. Also companies like facebook and Microsoft's UIs are in binds. Its their UI which underpin their their profitability and thus need to be protected, but the longer they go without changing the UI the more they open themselves to competition and the harder it is to sell new product.
Facebook 2009 should certainly not take a page out of Microsoft 2006's playbook on this one. Maybe just wait it out, after all in the cloud people have to upgrade. But this may be the last tiem facebook can change its UI in a significant fashion again.
