Facebook's Best Bet: Ignoring Whiny Users, Pushing Ahead With New Design

As Facebook prepares to roll out its new design across its entire user base, some of its more vocal members are increasingly raising a fuss. The "I Hate The New Facebook" group, which had 100,000 members last week, now has almost 700,000. The group even supplies a list of 20 things they hate about the new design: Some are confused about how to use it -- fair enough; others find it visually unappealing; while one wants to know why it doesn't work with Windows '98. One proposes a "mass move to MySpace or one of their competition sites."

But as Facebook no doubt knows, its best bet is ignoring most of its detractors and moving along with its new design. Why?

It's played this game before: Almost every time the company introduces a new feature, it's met with confusion or uproar -- which quickly and convincingly dies down.
The vast majority of its users aren't complaining about the new design. Last week, Facebook said some 30 million users have already checked out the new design -- almost a third of its membership -- and most of them aren't whining about it.
The new design -- and some of the new policies Facebook is including with it -- will help cut down on annoying, spammy Facebook apps. That's good news for everyone.

Facebook has already shown interest in listening to its users and developer community, and making changes based on their feedback -- last week, the company promised "one more interesting feature" to help developers make their apps easy-to-find and use for Facebook users. But if it's confident the new design is a better experience than the old one -- and we think it is -- its only option is to press on.