The next next big thing

So today Facebook rolled out their latest revamp -- Facebook's Revamped News Feed Is Faster, Newsier, More Like Twitter. Judging from the chatter on my homepage/newsfeed/ticker it's not going over too well with some of the natives. Comments like "HATE HATE HATE HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK" and "If it ain't broke don't fix it" proliferate.

However, I suspect the bigwigs at Facebook headquarters aren't too worried about the negative feedback. The thing is, Facebook is after more than a steady state condition of "not brokeness." In an age of ever shorter attention spans and ever faster technological change they need to keep coming up with the next next big thing. The death knell for Facebook would be to become boring and predictable. Unless the annoyed people on my friend's list hate the changes enough to stop logging on to the site -- which I don't see happening -- the latest version of Mark Zuckerberg's beautiful machine is a smashing success.

And I bet the programmers in Palo Alto are already hard at work coming up with algorithms for the next "new" Facebook. Which will come out just as we've gotten used to this one.