Facebook Gets A Facelift

Facebook went under the knife for a redesign and emerged Wednesday with a new look.

The social networking site's resident blogger Carolyn Abram said in an online post that the goal of the redesign was "to make Facebook simpler, more flexible, and to make our network structure more relevant."

When News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, Facebook was widely expected to be next. But the privately held company rejected a $1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo last year. As the sixth-ranked site in terms of U.S. Internet traffic, with some 19 million users, Facebook remains a tempting takeover target for larger Internet companies.

The new design features a redistribution and consolidation of menu options and the addition of drop-down menus on every user's profile page. An Inbox has been added to make communication with friends easier. And Facebook has launched 47,000 network pages that summarize public groups, events, and user statistics.

Having learned its lesson from user discontent following changes introduced last fall without community consultation, Facebook created an online group to preview the redesign and solicit user feedback. More than 100,000 users joined to offer their thoughts, according to the company, and some feedback ended up in the final product.