by Ali Gajani
| May 06, 2013
Recently Facebook revealed their new look, a complete redesign of the Timeline and the Newsfeed. The new layout incorporates the use of flat design principles, such as square shaped boxes with beautiful large typography. “The new Facebook is much cleaner, rich and simpler,” said Julio Zhuo (Design Director) in a statement.
The old Newsfeed was a place where new content was displayed on your screen every two to three minutes, making it a data junkyard. However, the new Newsfeed changes everything. By allowing the user to be able to organize and sort data streams into categories it functions more like a remote control for seeing what you want to see. With the new Newsfeed, users can sort through the feed to display streams of various types like; music, news, photos and status updates.
For example, an All Friends feed will show you everything your friends are sharing. Similarly, the Photos Feed will show you photos from your friends only. In addition, the Following feed now displays the latest news from the pages you like and the people you follow.
So how is the new Facebook like Google Plus?
The new design of Facebook is gorgeous, but there are some striking similarities to Facebook’s closest rival, Google Plus. Many people, as well as some from within Google, have said that Facebook’s inspiration came from Google Plus.
Facebook’s attempt to unclutter the design and make it more pleasing to the eyes by introducing more white space are the qualities that Google Plus has always been praised for. Facebook has made the new Newsfeed much more colorful and visual. They have achieved this by making small thumbnails of pictures posted by friends to large images, in similar fashion to Google Plus.
Another sign of Facebook emulating Google Plus is the left side bar. Prior to the current change, Facebook utilized a left aligned sidebar for accessing groups, favorites and other things. However, with the new sidebar things look a lot more like Google Plus. Facebook has used small icons on the navigation elements, very similar to Google Plus. Interestingly, Facebook has gone a step further and made the sidebar look better than Google Plus’ by designing it to be more colorful.
While it does appear that Facebook has taken some “inspiration” from Google Plus, it does not mean the two social networks are now pretty much the same. At the end of the day, Facebook has the edge over Google Plus due to its new feature of multiple news feeds and the overall design. Google Plus does have a bar which lets your control the amount of posts you want to see from your friends but its not as good as Facebook’s multiple feeds feature. Some might even say Facebook seems to be a refined version of Google Plus.
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