As you can see in the images below there is quite a lot of difference
as you can see when you compare the two side by side the changes are very apparent the whole layout of the page is completely different this is a risky move to make as this can make the usability of the website far less familiar there for the users may become uncomfortable within the site as they are used to layout and can easily navigate around the site without much thought.
I have looked into this further and looked into what people actually think of the new facebook, just looking through my facebook I can clearly see that there are some strong opinions.
"Having used Facebook for about 18 months, I've grown fond of it. It's a great way to keep in touch with people, and my initial reason for joining was to view friend’s pictures from nights out. But I'm skeptical about the core developers' intentions. There has to be a way of making this move very transitional, instead of throwing it on (unsuspecting) users in one lump saying "here ya go, this is based on less than 0.1% of user's feedback, live with it, it's staying". Doing that is a bad way of developing anything, especially a living website with many million users."
http://www.new.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=34082321101
"The whole new facebook is bollocks to be honest. Your mini feed is bunched into a wall and then your home page is sent in to a frenzy of many little things cluttering it up and then your side bar is gone. Now, if they had given a choice to the current members to use the classic design and the new "bollocks" design for eternity, I wouldn't have minded but this just pushing people into the boundary that they would not like to be in."
http://www.new.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=34082321101
Having looked at all the opinions I found on my facebook and the forums I found the general opinion on facebook layout is awful everyone hates it!!
So here goes its time for my opinion. I don’t really want to sit on the fence here but I really don’t have a strong opinion either way, I have used the new version for about a month now after the new button on the right hand corner on there screen tempted me into trying the new version. When I first started to use it I didn’t get on with it at all. Now i'm used to I quite like it. I like the fact that you can see who is online constantly there’s no constant clicking to see who is online. from a practitioners point of view however I keep thinking about the complexity of the code behind the scenes that makes me worry about people that have slower computers, browser and broadband speeds than what I do, the same goes with the new chat feature. All of the other changes are purely cosmetic don’t get me wrong i’m not usually one for change and I do keep stepping back into familiar ground to the old facebook. I think given the chance like me people will grow to love the new facebook as much as the old one.
