Facebook Redesigns Profile Pages

Facebook has been busy lately acquiring promising start-ups, poaching Google exployees, launching Facebook Places and otherwise tweaking and redesigning elements of its bread and butter social networking platform. After the initial build up, the official blog has announced new and redesigned profile pages for Facebook. The redesign will be automatically applied Facebook wide in the coming weeks, but if you're the impatient kind and want to be an early adopter, follow these steps to unlock the new Facebook profile:

• Browse over to this page.
• Hit the green button at the top right.
• Revel in the latest redesign of your profile page.

Revisions to the profile page include a summary listing of personal information right below the user name at the top of the page. It carries information on user's employment, hometown, college details, relationship status, languages spoken and birth date. This will be followed by a filmstrip of recently tagged photos placed directly below. Overall, a greater emphasis on photos is apparent with the new design.

According to the blog, you can now "highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates". These featured friends will be displayed at the left hand side and come with the ability to incorporate new friend groups or existing friends lists. Interests and activities carry increased focus on the profile pages.

Another major diversion is a lack of a ready text field to enter new status updates. The new design incorporates different content sensitive buttons to post status updates, photos, links and videos to your profile. I find that this speeds up the process as earlier one would have to wait for the icons to show up after clicking on the text field.

Finally, the new profile adds new ways to share interests and activities. The official blog elaborates, "You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school, your favourite musicians and sports teams, and more." It also adds a Philosophy section where one can also share their life philosophy by incorporating preferences on religions, political affiliations, in addition to your role models. Interests and experiences are now represented with images in keeping with the visual centric theme of the new profile.