As Facebook hits 100 million user mark, twenty percent have already opted in to the redesign

Venture Beat — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:08:09 -0400

Will Facebook users like the redesign? The company made a big gamble in changing the interface to focus on feeds — it’s a move that many in the “early adopter” crowd liked (including myself). But it’s also been met with some pockets of resistance from people who preferred the old site (including my college age sister, who’s in the company’s original demographic).

The company tells me today that around 20 million users have chosen to use the new design instead of the old one. Meanwhile, the company itself says it has reached 100 million unique monthly users worldwide. These redesign users have either been going to www.new.facebook.com, the temporary URL of the new design, or else they’ve clicked the link in the upper right hand corner of the site that gives them access to the new design.

The question is what will happen when the company relocates everyone to the new design next month. Will the 80 percent of its users who haven’t joined already hate it and (gasp) move on? Or will it be like the largest previous transition the company made — to the initial version of news feeds, back in 2006. At first, users were upset. They formed groups on Facebook to protest the feed. Then they became addicted to it.

At this point, Facebook isn’t saying much more. Blake Chandlee, a European commercial director at Facebook, recently told a British publication that the redesign had been well-received “after people get used to it.”

Maybe users will rebel once again, but I take this latest statistic and Chandlee’s comment to mean that the redesign is going to be a success. Sometimes “early adopters” aren’t just a tech-obsessed fringe but actually early adopters.

Note: ComScore, a third party web traffic measurement firm, has been reporting that traffic’s