Facebook, one of the fastest growing websites in the world, announced two significant developments in the past few weeks that could spur even further interest for the social networking powerhouse.

The first is an Arabic language version of the site intended to attract the region's 250 million native speakers online. In a story written by National reporters Tom Spender and Keach Hagey, analysts call the move "a development" in bridging the gap between the Arabic community and the online world. 

While about a fifth of Arabs, 50 million out of a population of around 250 million, use the internet, less than one per cent of all

online content is in Arabic, according to Mazen Halawi, a corporate

sales manager from the Arabic-language search engine Ayna. Arabic is

the world's fifth-most spoken language.

Facebook has about 175 million users worldwide and at least 3.6 million users in Arab

countries, according to statistics from AllFacebook.com, which does not

have figures for Algeria, Syria and Iraq. There are 526,480 Facebook

users in the UAE alone.

However, the second and much more contentious announcement made by Facebook has

announced, is a radical makeover of its main profile page. Instead of

displaying a general feed of recent news, notes, friend requests and

the like, the site now resembles the new social networking site du jour Twitter.

Fresh

off the heels of a spurned acquisition attempt for US$500 million in

company stock, Facebook has unabashedly mimicked Twitter's

communication style, replacing '@' replies with a dour-looking arrow,

making user pictures in the same square-boxed manner and shifting

content boxes around for a more streamlined presentation.

While

users often show some measure of revolt whenever Facebook has changed

its look in the slightest, it appears that the noise has reached

somewhat of a fervant pitch, even within its own employees.

From ValleyWag:

A tipster tells us that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: "He said something like 'the most

disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster

who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were

"stupid" for "listening to their customers." The anti-customer diktat has many Facebook employees up in arms, we hear. 

Software developer Dare Obosanjo offers his frustration with the new design: 

When your application becomes an integral part of your customers lives and identities, it is almost expected that they protest any major

changes to the user experience. The problem is that you may eventually

become jaded about negative feedback because you assume that for the

most part the protests are simply people's natural resistance to

change.

Over at VentureBeat, Eric Eldon and MG Siegler suggest Facebook should have listened more to its users before trying to reinvent the wheel:

Perhaps most importantly though, Facebook needs to do a better job easing users into this redesign. If it wants people to do their own

filtering using lists, it needs to make sure they know how. That's why

above the feed filters, there should be two options: One to show you

the news feed after the redesign, and one "legacy feed" below to show

you just the core Facebook elements that were previously in the news

feed prior to the redesign.

In effect, this would be the "training"

mechanism described above, and again, is critical before the real flood

of information starts coming in through Facebook Connect.

While it is understandable not to enflame the 180 million-odd users that login to the site, I tend to side with blogger Robert Scoble that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is right to do whatever he wants

with his site - if only to position itself to finally make some of that

cash it promises to one day attract.

Because my wife Maryam is totally addicted to Facebook. She hasn't left. She hasn't slowed down. She just told me she didn't like the new

design and made some noises that she was only going to use the iPhone

version (not true in my observations). So, if Zuckerberg didn't lose

Maryam and her friends, he's safe. He SHOULD NOT LISTEN to those who

are saying the new design sucks. It will keep him from getting to the

promised land where we mix businesses and people.

Here's what really is hanging out there for Facebook if Zuckerberg doesn't listen: billions. Maybe even trillions.

Given that the recent events evoked a certain Business Week article from 2000 that questions how Google could ever make any money - and we all know

how that turned out - maybe Facebook's latest move could be the start

of something big. Very big. 

(Photo: Negin, a 21-year old Iranian woman, browses her Facebook page at her home in Tehran.

Credit - Newsha Tavakolian / The National)