During one of our GAABfest episodes I commented on the huge embrace of Twitter’s social “stream” and general design by services such as Facebook and Friendfeed. It seemed like in only a couple months all three sites looked nearly identical in how they disseminated user updates and information. The Twitter interface was generally being accepted as the best one. Now TechCrunch is reporting that this redesign was the best thing Facebook and Friendfeed could have done. Both sites noted substantial growth after implementing the new look:
“Since the redesign went into effect, Facebook’s growth has accelerated. After flat 0.3 growth in February, Facebook added nearly 4 million unique U.S. visitors in March (up 6.6 percent over February), and another 5 million in April (up 10.3 percent over March) to end at 67.5 million domestic uniques, according to comScore.”
As for Friendfeed:
“…a redesign that went into beta in early April, and is now the default homepage seems to be paying off with a 28 percent rise in unique visitors in April and more time spent on the site ComScore only estimates 188,000 unique visitors in that month (Quantcast
puts it a bit higher at 241,000), so it is still extremely niche, but at least its numbers are now headed in the right direction.”
Based on those numbers the trend seems to be that people like how Twitter presents information to users. For more details on this, and some fancy graphs, check out the full TechCrunch article.
Bob Starr, code named Starbuck, is a geek with a passion for film journalism and technology. You can follow Bob on Twitter (
