Profile pages on Facebook are getting a total makeover.
Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., held an hourlong briefing for the news media Wednesday to preview changes coming to the site next month.
The biggest change: user profiles on the service will evolve from a single, flat and often cluttered page into four tabbed sub-pages dubbed feed, info, photos and applications.
“There is a tremendous amount of information being generated” on Facebook, said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing. “We wanted a simpler and easier way for people to share it.”
Feed, the primary page people will see when they visit other users on the service, will broadcast all of a user’s’ recent Facebook activities — photos he or she uploaded, wall messages and new friends, for example. Users can expand or shrink these updates to, for example, show more thumbnails from a new set of photos, and will have more control over the information their friends see about them.
The info tab will contain all the data typically found on Facebook pages today — a person’s contact information, education history and top friends, for example. The photo tab will have a portfolio of images.
Finally, programs created by third-party developers since last summer and installed by users are relegated to a fourth “application boxes” tab and will generally become less visible.
But Facebook executives said there will be new opportunities for some developers — those creating the best applications — to get their programs mentioned prominently on feed pages, and to entice users to create custom tabbed pages devoted to their programs. “This will shift success to those applications that are deeply and meaningfully engaging,” said Mr. Palihapitiya. “Applications that are more static in nature may not be as successful as they may have been in the current ecosystem.”
The changes come as Facebook aims to simplify its user pages, which have become as cluttered with applications, photos and information as pages on MySpace — long criticized by visual purists as being a bit too visually chaotic.
The changes come amid indications that growth at Facebook might be tailing off. According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, 22.4 million users visited Facebook in April, down from 24.9 million in March. Overall year-over-year growth slowed to 56 percent from last year’s 98 percent growth rate.
