The old “Live Feed” option showed you not only your friends’ “status” messages, but also let you know when your friends made new friends (some of whom might be people you yourself want as friends!), as well as when your friends joined groups. Regardless of anything else, Facebook’s new layout fails because it doesn’t have these features.

What Facebook really needs to do is add the old “Live Feed” features back into its new design (and allow users to keep on using the old “Live Feed” until this retrofit has been done). But if they stubbornly refuse to do this, I hope it might be possible for someone to fill the void via an application.

Even apart from this likely outcome, I question the wisdom of the policy. Facebook’s blog post announcing it says, “We encourage you to think about using Feed forms and prompting publishing of stories from within your application or website whenever appropriate.” Those last two words are indeed important. Most Facebook apps, and almost all the most popular ones, are games. How often is it appropriate for a game to ask a user, “Would you like to publish a feed story?” How often will this enhance rather than disrupt the user’s experience? Even for apps that aren’t games, it seems to me there are few occasions when asking a user to publish a feed story isn’t just distracting.