Facebook Is More Relevant Than Ever

Posted on Sep 22, 2011

AP / Paul Sakuma

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows the new profile, Timeline, during the f/8 conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

Facebook showcased yet another redesign for the social media site Thursday, this time to the long-neglected profile page, saying it hoped the changes would make the site a leader in media consumption.

The new profile design is called Timeline and will make it easier for users to go back to view information on their profile from the time they first started using the site. New verbs were also added to the now tired “like” button, including “read,” “listen,” “watch” and for some odd reason, “run.”

But possibly more interesting than the redesign is the announcement by Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor that more than 350 million people now use the site on their cellphones each month, a big deal for places like Africa where mobile phones are decidedly more prevalent than computers. That, coupled with another Facebook benchmark—passing more than 800 million users, or close to 12 percent of the world’s total population—is evidence that the social media site is still a force to be reckoned with. —BF

Los Angeles Times:

The goal of the new Timeline design and the increasingly sharing-focused apps is in part to get users to spend more time on Facebook for not only their social networking, but also media consumption.

Facebook wants to be the first stop the world goes to in finding music, movies, news, books and even recipes. But while it’s competing with Apple, Google and other rivals such as Twitter, it’s doing so by making apps outside of Facebook integrate with Facebook, and it’s doing so without an app store like iTunes or an app market like Android.

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