Facebook got some shiny new features for its sixth birthday.
The social networking giant launched a redesign on Thursday, in conjunction with its sixth-anniversary celebrations.
“It's rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about,” the site's founder, Mark
Zuckerberg, wrote in a blog post.
The tweaks are relatively minor and aim to make the site's most popular features more easily accessible on the home page.
Notifications, requests and messages have been added to the top menu.
As well, the left-hand menu has been re-organized to make accessing friends' content easier.
A Games and Applications button has also been added to the left menu, in response to the increasing popularity and profitability of third-party apps on the site.
Facebook, which has a spotty record with regards to privacy, says users can adjust their privacy settings to ensure their activities don't show up in any of these new feeds.
Facebook engineer Jing Chen described the changes in detail in a blog post.
Reaction to the changes has been mixed. While more than 3,500 people had “liked” Cheng's blog post as of Friday afternoon, a number of commenters complained they would like the option to opt-out of the redesign.
In the past, Facebook redesigns have been met with contempt from thousands of users, and dozens of protest Facebook groups.
One fan page called “Not another redesign!” popped up shortly after the birthday announcement, with the goal of getting 1 million members. But as of Friday at 1 p.m. EST, it only had six.
About 80 million of Facebook's 400 million users got the new site on Thursday. It's expected to roll out to everyone else soon.
