FB Fury

A new 'user friendly' design for the social networking website Facebook has provoked howls of protest from hundreds of thousands of users. Facebookers from around the world have said they found the new layout confusing and harder to navigate.

Complaints are likely to multiply after the company revealed the changes will be made permanent. Over the last seven weeks users have had the option to switch back to the traditional design.

 In an open letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 24, said there was an option to switch back to the older  version 'for a little while.'  But within the next fortnight all 100million users will be forced to use the new-look site.

The amazing thing is that this paragraph was not written this week - it was written in September 2008.......

However Facebook Friends across the globe are just as MAD (maybe madder??) about the FB changes made this week - dozens of articles have been written, several clever jokes, some satire and almost viral misinformation and angst is afoot......

What makes me so curious is why? 

Why are we so mad about FB changing?

Is it about a global aversion to change....... a desire to keep things the same in an uncertain world?

Is it about control?  Do we just hate it so much that someone didn't ask us if we wanted the change?  (we forget this is something we subscribe to for free and could unsubscribe from at the click of a button )

Are we that worried about "privacy"?

Are we so  irritated that something that worked fine for us was changed and now we have to spend some time in our busy lives to figure it out?

Or is the whole FB Fury really just a symptom of the world being so connected, so able to give mass voice to their feelings?

I think there are several answers and many reasons - I am sure someone somewhere is writing a thesis or paper on the psychological undercurrents of the whole thing.

What I do know is this....... worse things happened in the world this week that deserve our mass voice, our mass angst, our mass attention, our mass anger and our mass action.

Let's move on.......