Complete Facebook Profile?

Now that Facebook has finally introduced the new profile-pages, I am seeing more and more people completing their personal informations. Why is that?

Picture Layout

First of all we have to focus on the new layout in a whole. As you can see all of a sudden pictures are much more important than they used to be. The picture of yourself is given a lot more weight by enlargement and repositioning of other informations. Furthermore your eye automagically gets pulled towards the following 5 pictures which are chosen from your pictures. In my opinion they are not chosen randomly, Facebook is rather trying to serve at least 4 pictures with faces on them and 1 without.

Furthermore I have to say that the new layout of the pictures reminds me of the, now old, MySpace. Before the MySpace relaunch some weeks ago they used to display your profilepicture plus some more pictures from your albums. Now MySpace seems to have dropped the additional pics and to serve only your profilepicture, by default.

Personal Information

All Information about you has been moved to the top, right below your name.

To me this looks like a nice trick. It is not a necessity to display it there, just for design's sake. Instead I have the feeling that it is indeed a psychological trick. When the "About you" is given that much weight, you feel the pressure to put information inside there. At least this is what I experienced. I never gave much about my informations, so I left them empty. Now I have the feeling I have to put stuff in there, so the area below my name looks filled.

Maybe this won't happen to people with less of an ego, but I like telling what I do.

I am experiencing this with my friends too. All of a sudden people start updating their hometown, their current city, their languages, education and so on.

Friends

The next huge thing to notice is the friendslist. In case you are in a relationship you will immediately notice that your honey now has a picture beside his/her name and is contrasted out by one line above and one below, giving this information a lot more weight. This also happens if you have friends marked as family members etc.

Below all this we see the friendlist. In case you have different lists, you can now show them off there. This can also serve as a "best friends" feature as, you social media veterans should now, MySpace always had it.

Activity Stream

The activity stream. All mighty place which keeps log of everything I have ever done. To my surprise, I did not notice any changes to it. The position is still below the global information. Seems like it has proven it's position to Facebook there.

The Right Side

One more thing that jumps into my eye when I visit a friend's profilepage is the "Your Friendship" section to the right. I can see the latest things we both did or did to each other, like a wall post or a photo comment. I feel like I am trying to be convinced to use friendship pages, which in my opinion are not a good idea unless you truly want to stalk another person. I don't know about you, but my friends don't care much if I do not comment their latest picture or like their newest post.

Furthermore you can see all the nice little ads to the right. When it comes to me, I hate ads where I do not need them. Also I think the site looks truly stuffed with all that stuff going on on the right side. When you visit your own profile, all this is hidden and your profile looks gorgeous. However when I look at friends profiles and all the ads get thrown at me, I feel the whole design loses a lot of stability.

Concluding

Finally, I am finished with my small subjective analysis of the new Facebook Profilepages. To be honest I quite like the design. It looks a lot more cleaner and feels solid (looks like they are now conforming to a baseline grid ;-)), except when it comes to the right section of the layout. I think there is some room for improvement there, but I can also understand that advertisement needs space and is necessary.

What do you think of the new profile pages? Do you agree with my observations or am I just another social media slave/target?

Every comment is welcome!