A recent poll of 2 000 people conducted by USA Today and Gallup has found that of those Facebook users who are aware of the imminent changes to the social networking platform, 56% dislike them.
In the past month, Facebook rolled out a number of changes to its user interface, including friend lists, a subscribe button, a ticker of real-time activity and the reorganisation of the news feed.
The biggest changes are still to come, however, as the social network is due to release its profile redesign, Timeline, and accompanying Open Graph apps with “frictionless” sharing, to all users.
Timeline essentially creates a digital scrapbook of a user's entire life, highlighting important life events and resurfacing all content ever posted to the site since the user joined the service.
Mashable recently conducted a poll asking whether people would go to the effort of filling in their Timelines on Facebook. Of the over 3 200 responses, the majority (58%) said they wouldn't, because it would take too much time and effort.
Timeline is currently in developer preview phase only, and official roll-out has been postponed after Facebook was sued by Timelines.com for copyright infringement.
Blissful ignorance
However, according to the Gallup poll, the average Facebook user is not very likely to be aware of the changes afoot on Facebook, with only 34% of the people surveyed saying they are aware of new features.
Some 87% of daily users were aware of the changes. Of all the users who are aware of the changes, just 36% said they like them.
While Timeline and frictionless sharing have raised concerns among privacy advocates, the poll showed that the more people use Facebook, the less likely they are to be concerned about privacy. Thirty-five percent of weekly users surveyed in the poll said they were “very concerned” about privacy, while only 26% of daily users said the same.
Facebook users have a tendency to resist any changes on the platform, but resistance to change is yet to translate into a decline in numbers for Facebook - which is still the largest social network in the world, with over 800 million active users.
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