The other day, I was talking with my friend, Nathan, about Facebook. I don't use Facebook a ton, but I do use it more often and more consistently than I ever have in the past. I believe the much-hated new UI has a lot to do with it. The big complaint about the new UI is that it hides a lot of Facebook features. When I say a lot, I truly mean all but the 3 or 4 main Facebook features. At the same time, they did add one new feature: you can now reply to other users' statuses. So they basically traded 98% of Facebook for Twitter. The interesting thing is that even though I am not convinced the new UI itself is much better, I find I use Facebook more than before, because of vastly simplified user experience!

Now hidden in the depths of Facebook, among the many missing features is the Facebook API. The majority of Facebook API apps are total crap! This is where Facebook is ahead of the curve, because they have already realized this and made it super hard to find the apps. MySpace and every other social network out there was left scrambling to add their own API. And guess what? The majority of those API apps will be crap too! In fact, the majority of API apps for anything are going to be crap. (The best you can ever hope for is that an API will make it easier for the company itself to add good features to the product.) So Facebook made their API and has realized that even though it is a great idea from a PR perspective, it totally sucks from a quality perspective. Since the apps appear to be a part of Facebook to the average user, but are usually much lower quality, the user sees Facebook as having dropped in quality.

This I think is the most interesting "feature" of the new Facebook UI. It tells us that the Facebook people know that as much fun as I had playing Knighthood a few months back, I eventually got tired of it sucking and quit using Facebook for a while. I didn't just quit Knighthood, but I quit Facebook too. Since then Facebook has Twitterified itself, people are being more social than ever, and Facebook has put the "social" back into social networking.