I couldn't agree more. Granted, I think it will be a much slower process than say, the Digg exodus. I think in the next few months if Facebook doesn't make some drastic improvements (read: simpler), it will be past the point of saving. No turning back.
I think MartinCron's point was that everyone always predicts Facebook's demise "three months into the future," and that this will also turn out to be nothing.
If that's the point, I disagree with him. We've seen far too many unstoppable behemoths collapse under their own weight to believe that anything is too big to fail. The difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, Yahoo, IBM, or any other company with a massive user base is that Facebook is run by a CEO with very little experience (compared to AOL, Yahoo, IBM, etc) and no fall-back plan that could let them remain profitable and relevant when their moment on top is over.
I'm really just pointing out that every single dire prediction about Facebook's demise hasn't happened, and I don't see how this one is any different from the last N times.
I think Facebook will fail. I just doubt that it'll fail anytime soon. I don't particularly like this redesign, but I think it's just going to be a blip that people grumble about and get over in a couple weeks.
I think there is another big problems with the "mini-Facebook" live feed in the top right corner which I haven't seen mentioned much:
What is the usefulness of this information? Why am I supposed to care that College Acquaintance A commented on Person I Don't Know's photo? How is this useful to me? 80% of the items in the live feed are noise like this, and 15% of the remaining are items that I can see in the main feed itself.
This, along with the Read/Watched/etc buttons just seem to lower the signal-to-noise ratio.
My guess is that it's there for the sizable population of facebook users who check it compulsively. For a lot of people, the appearance of constant activity is going to be a lot more interesting than the appearance that nothing is happening, even if for only fifteen or twenty minutes. I can see this increasing 'engagement' a lot, and it's easy enough to ignore for people who find it annoying.
And your optimal signal-to-noise ratio is still there in your news feed.
But it's bad for compulsive checkers, too, in that it doesn't let you peruse every item in order like the old News Feed design did. It's a ticker, and so far as I can tell, that means that when you miss an item it's gone.
You can still do that if your news feed is set to show "Recent Stories" and not "Top Stories". The mini sidebar is mostly stuff that hasn't been in the news feed for years, like when your friends comment on or like other friends' posts.
Personally I love the lists function -- adds a lot of utility for me. Subscriptions are a plus too, though I prefer to see content from pages I've 'liked' than people I've subscribed too. I'd much rather have all this info than news feed info from people I'm no longer even acquaintances with. But yes, a bit too much feature creep as a whole. I could do without the Top Stories.
honestly, it's kinda funny watch this big screw up of facebook the same day google is ready to offer everyone G+ at its home page...seriously, there's so much stuff going on on the facebook home page now that my brain immediately chose to ignore all the new "features" to preserve my sanity, and I have no plans to try to adapt to it... might as well move to G+
to me it seems like facebook got tired of itself and decided to commit suicide, of course, not before telling everyone go go f%*#& themselves
This is where it has always been, and where it always will be.