Every once in a while I clean up my desktop. I remove all the crap that’s been saved to it, copied in haste and not filed away properly, and delete it all.
In another move that strengthens the concept of your facebook profile page being your social desktop, they have just launched a “Profile Clean-up Tool”.
The Profile Clean-Up Tool will recommend to users that they keep their Friends, Mini Feed, Wall, Basic, Personal Infomration and the top 12 application boxes. Any other applications which are currently installed but not used as much as those top 12 will be placed into a “Show Extended Profile” box.
The profile box is a major point of both existing user re-engagement and new user acquisition - A surprising number of applications are downloaded after seeing them on friends’ profile pages as opposed to invites and the Application browser - Any move by facebook to ‘hide’ application boxes from profile pages is bound to negatively impact application use and growth. That being said, the average facebook user has 13 applications installed, so this change should hide at most only 7.5% of a person’s profile box.
Ultimately, I think this is a good move which protects the user experience - some profile pages were taking as much as 30 secs or more to load. Add to this the knowledge facebook have of seeing user’s ’spring-clean’ their profile pages every 3-4 months and it makes sense.
