TipAdept Dot Com

Facebook was once known for its simple, streamlined presentation. It stood in marked contrast with the crazy, psychedelic mishmash that was a typical MySpace page. But as Facebook has grown -- with hundreds of third-party applications, as well as advertising, Facebook promotions and other features -- the site design has lost focus.

That's the issue the company is striving to address with a new redesign announced Wednesday. The new site features a tabbed interface for profile pages instead of all content being dumped into a single page.

Such features as feed, information, photos and applications will each have separate tabs -- and users will a substantial amount of flexibility to customize their profiles. For instance, users will be able to move specific applications to their own tabs, and can specify content to be displayed on the main profile page.

Tackling spam

"We need to take a step forward with respect to the user experience and the UI that we present to the consumer because the amount of information that's being created both passively and proactively is increasing," said Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of product marketing, at a company presentation.

Some of that information was noninformation -- spam, says Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group. "Facebook needed to do something -- it was generating way too much spam and really starting to get annoying," Enderle said. "Part of the redesign does appear to address the spam issue."

Even a seemingly design improvement is fraught with danger for Facebook, which has faced user pushback on a number of features it has introduced over the past year. Most controversial was the Beacon ad program, which broadcast online shopping behavior to a user's Facebook friends. Facebook ultimately had to severely scale back that program.

Change is hard

There's not much here for users to complain about,...