Scrambling to undo Facebook's changes as they roll out
Browser extension that hides Facebook's new features and more rushes to keep up as more announcements come out of f8.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
The upgrades and additions to Facebook are rolling out of the f8 developers' conference today, while other developers are working furiously to come up with ways to undo them.
Better Facebook is a Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera extension that's been around for a few years now and allows a comprehensive set of at least 75 customization options to Facebook's look, feel, and features.
Since Facebook revamped its news feed this week--much to the chagrin of many users--Better Facebook has seen a big bump in traffic and new users, as developer Matt Kruse posted on the Better Facebook fan page late yesterday:
Wow, it's been kind of a crazy day. Big FB changes, Dropbox stopped serving my images (and started again), the web site got over 100,000 hits, and this page acquired 5,000 new fans!
The changes--including the addition of a real-time scrolling "ticker" of Facebook friends' activity--originally caused Better Facebook to "disappear" from the interface for many users. Kruse went to work updating the extension and adding new capability to control and mitigate the new additions. The latest version includes the option to hide the ticker.
New suggestions from users for possible "fixes" to be integrated into Better Facebook have also started to roll in to Kruse at an accelerated clip.
Kruse says donations have continued to flow in to support his work, which is a good thing, because he's likely to have a whole lot of work ahead of him. The redesign announced today will give Facebook users the ability to integrate "Open Graph apps" into their experience, adding music, TV, movies, news, and a whole lot more to the feed. That ought to keep Kruse busy for a while.