Parisians Take To The Streets To Protest Facebook Redesign

22nd April 2009

There is a saying that goes, ‘Change is the only constant’, which is quite true, but it is equally true that ‘all change is resisted’ at least initially. The second phrase seems to apply to the case of the social networking site Facebook in France.

Facebook redesigned the user homepage earlier this year, and these changes have not been very well received by their users. A lot of users think the new design tries to mimic Twitter too much and ends up being quite confusing, making it difficult to find anything.

While it is quite understandable that some flaws in the new design could upset users, it does seem rather extreme that they should decide to turn up on the streets in large numbers and protest against this change.

That, however, seems to be exactly what happened in Paris this week. Demonstrators collected at the Arche de la Defense, with banners to protest against the redesign of the Facebook user homepage.

Blogger Alex Herwijnen, happened to be at the site at that time. He took some pictures of the event and sent them to TechCrunch, who then reported the event.

A number of French Facebook Groups have been created to protest against the new design, the most popular of which boasts over 32,000 members since the 13th of March. Surprisingly though, there has been no other news of these demonstrations in the media. There was also no news of any related groups or events.