Facebook Freakout. Deep breaths people.

I'm not usually the first to come to the defense of Facebook but you know I actually do feel bad for them this go around in terms of the latest iteration of the home page scandal. There has been a ton written about the supposed "Twitterification" of Facebook. All because they dared to try update the homepage layout. I remember back when they changed the layout the previous time and the all out collective conniption fit their users threw. As a result I tweeted back when the first screenshots of the most recent layout were released that we should be bracing for a freak out the likes of which the internet has never seen. Sure enough said freak out simmering since the changes went live has begun to roll to its expected boil.

Why feel bad for Facebook though? Well imagine you are a product designer or a developer at Facebook, by most accounts one of the Internet's hottest companies, except you can't innovate anything without the masses complaining every step of the way. I've been on Facebook for I guess a little over a year now and form what I've observed anytime Facebook does well just about ANYTHING it triggers an all out "sky is falling" level of reaction and downright panic from "Facebook users." This must make it pretty hard to innovate and also discouraging to work on something new for so long and then have irate Facebook users attack not only the company but the developers personally.

For the record, I actually like the new layout and this is probably because I spend way more of my time over at Twitter than I do on Facebook. Some interesting points have been raised, with little to back them up admittedly, about the demographics of Facebook vs. Twitter. It's been said that Twitter's demo skews to the say 25 and older crowd where as Facebook's demo screws to a younger high-school/college crowd. If that is the case and we generalize for a minute then the reaction of the Facebook users every time they change something is troubling indeed.

It seems to me that if the collective Facebook masses had their way or were, god forbid, running the Internet at large we would all still be surfing Web .01 in IE 2.0 and dealing with a constant barrage marquee tags, background MIDIs when a page loads, and pop-ups (kids ask your friends born before 1985). With progress and innovation come change. Imagine a world for a minute where there was no Facebook at all, yeah don't like that very much either do you?

If Facebook truly represents the next generation of innovators we're relying on to solve the world's problems let us hope their overreaction and inability to adapt in the face of Facebook home page updates is not indicative of how they approach life in general. Otherwise we're all in a lot of trouble.

Sometimes you have to give change a chance, stop take a deep breath, close your eyes, open them again and just try to understand the reasons behind the changes, learn the valuable life skill of adaptation, resist the temptation to throw a tantrum, and in the end you may just find the the people who worked really hard on those changes aren't as worthless as you might think. Maybe...they are even on to something.