I absolutely hate the latest Facebook redesign. And, for the record, I loved the last one, so I'm not some kind of knee-jerk negativist. The new facebook removes the single most important feature, the live news feed. Facebook's major contribution to the online world was the live news feed. Everything—updates, pictures, interests, links, notes, etc. etc. etc. all in one time-sorted feed. It was brilliant, and obviously I think so since I make some kind of minimal replication of it on my own front page.

And now they have removed it. The new... thing ... whatever it is .. that I get is more like twitter. I don't need another twitter. I already have twitter. What I want is my live facebook feed. Now, if I want to see what photos people have been tagged in, what apps they have been using, etc., I don't know what to do. The right hand side seems to have some stuff there ... but I can't filter it.

Now what kind of idiot would destroy their company's chief asset in an eyeblink? When you've got something that good, you don't change it, you nurture it. Look at google's home page. They are so careful in making changes. They do statistical A/B tests on every single change they ever make, and only keep the ones that make people's results better. When they make a change that sucks, it's also minor and gets rolled back quickly. So my point is this: for FB to ruin their own user experience is really out of the ordinary and insane.

Who would do such a thing? Only a tyrant who's lost touch. Which means Mark Zuckerberg has become a tyrant and lost touch. For evidence that he's become a tyrant, we can look at the following evidence:

Gawker: A tipster tells us that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: "He said something like 'the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were "stupid" for "listening to their customers."

TechCrunch: Facebook says this is about getting a CFO with public company experience ("We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience."). Which is complete nonsense (and poorly thought out nonsense at that), because [Gideon] Yu, after a short stint at YouTube and an even shorter stint at Sequoia Capital, was the treasurer and SVP Finance at Yahoo. Which is very much a public company.

For evidence that he's lost touch, well, there's plenty. As of now over 1 million users have gone to the trouble to install an app specifically to complain about the new layout. I know that facebook has ~ 175 million users, but that's still a HUGE user backlash.

Now apparently they are going to roll back some of the changes... we'll see how that goes. Presumably at a company of that size the investors are going to force Zuckerberg to back down. See this Joy of Tech comic for an idea. But people are also going to compare Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs of the 80s, when he was forced out of Apple for being an asshole.

Let's be completely clear on this. Steve Jobs WAS an asshole in the eighties! My impression is that the film Pirates of Silicon Valley is quite accurate. And from working at Apple during Steve's second coming, I can say that he still could be a real asshole, the kind that gets things done and doesn't have patience for idiots. The difference is, that Jobs never did anything really stupid to his user base.

So, what's going to happen now? I suspect that Z won't back down very easily, and that we're going to see more conflict, clashes and problems in the future. It's unfortunate, and I hope that wiser heads prevail and FB recovers the truly awesome user experience that it used to have.

Update: Gawker thinks Zuckerberg should go. Strong stuff.

And Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg has begun "believing his own hype," a source says. He believes he is the genius the magazine covers say he is. Mark has always been an executive who made life difficult for those he disagreed with. "Mark is a very demanding person to work for, if you screw up, one day you are in, the next day out, persona non grata," says one former employee. Now that he thinks he's Steve Jobs, he's unbearable.