[corresation]

This sounds contrived. Being the skeptical sort we should all be, there is no reason to believe the sources (if you believe they exist) regarding supposed cynical reasons they didn't proceed with a considered UI.

Maybe Facebook found that people really actually liked the other variant better? Or maybe they were just ambivalent about it, and if we've learned anything about widely deployed social media sites, it's that you need a really, really good reason to change things.

And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left, instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.

[addMitt]

It wasn't just the style. It would separate content into easy to digest categories. You could pull up a picture feed (from that top-right section) and just see new pictures. It would filter stuff like music/pictures/game shit/etc into categories, and deliver more focused content in each category. The primary News Feed wasn't as cluttered with bullshit. It made it easier to ignore things like game notifications.

Accordingly, we could see the content we wanted to, faster. Which is bad, because we don't forcefully digest as much undesired content as before. Meaning we leave the site faster and don't look at as many ads. And thus, it's more profitable to stick with the shitty News Feed that is essentially your only source of compiled information from your network, outside of group/list feeds that filter content by user, but not type of content.

I was really looking forward to the filter-by-type-of-content direction, but I'm sure it's now something they'll leave in their back pocket, should they start losing numbers directly due to user experience.