Yesterday Facebook users were treated to a brief preview of what may be coming changes to the site’s layout, according to Mashable. Forty-five minutes after the new pages went live, Facebook went down and remained so for nearly an hour (some users report they were able to get sporadic access to the site during this time). The new design rollout was purely accidental, you see, and Facebook worked to quickly revert back to its original design.
Facebook tweeted apologies for the downtime and admitted that the new designs users saw were works in progress. “Some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal,” read a tweet from Facebook.
Users caught glimpses of several significant changes before the site was taken offline. For one, a “memories” link was reported that allowed users to look back at old status updates, photos, and past friend acquisitions.
There were also reports of new photo features which allowed users to view images in separate lightbox viewing windows with an all black backgrounds allowing for a more immersive photo-viewing experience. Also briefly noticed: an RSS-like “outside world” news feed and an overhaul to Facebook Pages that allowed for easier account switching for page admins.
Facebook hasn’t yet acknowledged if any of these previewed features will be part of an imminent upgrade. But if Facebook were to deploy the changes sooner rather than later, it wouldn’t come as a total shock. We’ve felt the winds of change were blowing over at the social networking site ever since Facebook rolled out new profile pages earlier this month.
