Facebook is rolling out what could be called an aspirational redesign known as FB5– a move meant to focus on what the company actually wants the app to be and not just polishing what it already is. CEO of the company Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook's F8 conference. He said, “This is the biggest change we have made to the Facebook app and site in five years,” The new logo features a brighter blue bubble around Facebook's distinctive white ‘f’, which attempts to put a more uplifting spin on the brand which has been subjected to many controversies off late. Much of the blue will also be sucked out of the interface making it look more calm and sparse. The change is incorporated in addition to the already existing ‘More’ option that encompasses the not so frequently used features and makes the interface look less cluttered.
Functionally, FB5 means placing Groups near the centre of a freshly tabbed interface for both Facebook's website and app, and putting suggestions for new ones to join across the service. By implementing this feature Facebook's goal is to only to double the number of people using this feature but to get them all into meaningful Groups. Groups for specific interests like gaming or health support will get special features, and power users will get a dashboard of updates across all their communities. One of the rapidly emerging features, marketplace, will be placed just near to Groups, which the company says is a move to fuel the former. Just a year and a half after launch, Marketplace had 800 million monthly users.
Zuckerberg started the conference by declaring “The future is private!” He spoke about how Facebook plans to make its messaging apps encrypted, how it wants to be a living room rather than just a town hall and how it's following the shift in user behaviour away from broadcasting. However, it seems that nothing new has been done for privacy protection. Maybe given the lack of direct competitors in its league, and the absence of a mass exit of users over its constant privacy scandals, it was the outdated product itself that was killing Facebook.
