Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the new Timeline design. But according to a new poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look.
Seventy percent of respondents to a poll of 1,900 people held by online opinion site SodaHead.com said they did not like the Timeline design and that Facebook should get rid of it. Just 20 percent of respondents liked Timeline, and 10 percent said they did not have Facebook profiles.
And it turns out that the older people are, the less they like the new design: Only 10 percent of people over 65 liked Timeline, compared with 34 percent of people age 18 to 24.
That won’t come as a big surprise to the folks at Facebook, since it lines up with the research the company itself did before Timeline was announced this past fall. At a press Q&A during the f8 conference, in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that older users tended to respond more negatively to Timeline than younger ones. But, he said, that would not stop Facebook from making big changes: “The world is moving quickly, and we want to be innovative and try new things,” he said at the time.
Either way, it seems that Timeline is here to stay. With the Open Graph API, scores of third-party developers have invested significant time and money into building apps that work within the Timeline interface. So now it is not only Facebook that is tied to the new look but also an entire ecosystem of other companies. Besides, this is certainly not the first time Facebook users have reacted negatively to a change in the site’s look, and it seems that by now the people who run the social networking company have learned to ride out the initial jeers.
