Is Facebook growing up too fast?

CNET News has a nice article on Facebook's growth and the challenges that presents for the site. This is a real challenge for them. The site has gone from a small user base and being based in some guy's dorm room to being an international phenomenon with 200,000,000 users spanning the globe in a very short time. Yet they still run the site like it's that dorm-based system. Somebody high up gets the idea they want to emulate Twitter (why?) so the application interface changes to emulate Twitter. No consultation with users, no long beta period, no options to switch back. They just do it. With 200 million users, you can't do it that way. Management conveys an almost Microsoft-ish indifference to customer needs.

I don't really understand the whole redesign to begin with. They want to emulate Twitter. But Twitter is a totally different application. It functions differently and provides a totally different service. Facebook is about interaction between friends, finding new friends, and so forth. To that end things like notification that a friend has been tagged in a photo or that they added some other person--who I might know--as a friend seems pretty appropriate, but is gone.

The most amusing thing, though, is this:

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing--not just information about themselves but what people are doing now--easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook's director of products and a confidant of Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

'That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,' he says.

So the main thing about the new design is to disseminate information faster to your friends. Good idea. The old news feed did a pretty good job of that, by auto-updating every so often so that if someone put that message out it would show up on my feed pretty quickly. (I also have the Facebook toolbar for firefox which does a pretty good job of that also.) To make it better and distribute that information faster, they...take away the automatic updates, so updates I used to get automatically and within a few minutes now might take hours. In the name of making it faster. Huh?