When I started writing this post yesterday, I started it out with “as Facebook’s vocal user base clears their collective throats to decry the forthcoming changes to profile pages and news feeds (only to have it abate after a week and carry on as usual)”. By the time I have got around to finishing it, the roar has become almost deafening.

The changes Facebook has introduced over the last few days ahead of the F8 Developer conference have been met with what seems to be more outcry that usual from users, and I suspect will probably be at fever pitch if Robert Scoble’s Google+ update is anything to go by.

Change for many is a difficult thing to handle, and I think where Facebook has tipped the scales this time is too much change in one go, messing with the news feed and adding the subscribe button in the space of a few days.

I never usually have an issue, but this time is different. Personally I have never seen the value in Top Stories when compared to Most Recent updates, and Facebook have made it clear that their shift is to focus on the former. For me, I want to know what is happening now.

Obviously all changes they make are linked to two things – audience and revenue. But if you make it difficult or unpleasant for the audience, then revenue suffers as a result. With such a big shift, they need to make it much easier to customize an experience.

Their privacy settings page make it fairly clear on what to do when it comes to the updates you share, but it needs another layer – they updates you want to see (not part of privacy obviously, but an interface that is just as simple to use). Not an assumption based on an algorithm, but a clear declaration of intent and interest.

Facebook needs to make their opt in for updates / news feed items as clear as the privacy control dialoge

What is exciting for me though is the introduction of new buttons that are being planned – in addition to “like”, there will be “watched”, “read” “listened” and I’ve seen speculation that developers will be able to look at creating their own. This is a major step forward and will be of particular interest to brands from a product perspective, making it much more indicative of intent than just “like”.

A side note on Google+

Just a quick footnote, in other exciting (and well timed news), Google+ is finally out of invite only, which can only be a good thing.

While invites have been freely available to the “field trial”, this finally opens it up. Which is good, considering when you look at the stats published by Digital Buzz show that almost 75% of the top 10 occupations of users are tech related.

There is so much more application potential within the platform other than discussing with each other what it does, and hopefully this will realise that.

In my past post, I talked about how I thought Google+ was going to hit Twitter the hardest. So far, no one has lost any major ground to it. What it has done however, and best of all, is drive one of the biggest shifts in functionality and innovation in social we have seen in a while. Which ultimately is a good thing.

UPDATE – Ben Parr over at Mashable has seen what is coming, and claims “On Thursday, developers will be elated, users will be shellshocked and the competition will look ancient. On Thursday, Facebook will be reborn. Prepare yourselves for the evolution of social networking.” Check out the post here.

PHOTO – toodlepip