I've been behind in my blogging, and I was worried that today's post might be moot before I wrote it. But logging into Facebook this morning, I see that the new interface is still there.

It's been thoroughly thrashed by Facebook users, and I'm expecting it to go away soon, but you never know.     Maybe Facebook is in The Bubble.

It's not just a subjective thing. In short time I'm seeing people report that they can't find features that you'd expect to be more easily found. "How do I find new groups"?

I'm also seeing for the first time people writing to their status messages that are obviously meant for someone else's wall.  I don't know if this is because of a change in the interface to write back on the wall of someone who wrote on yours, or if Facebook eliminated the ability to comment back to a post someone made on your wall. But a status like: "Let's check our schedules and see what works out. Meanwhile, love to you both." is clearly a one-to-one reply and not a "status". This isn't the user's fault here; I'm seeing it often enough to blame the new interface.

I'll be interested in the stats, but I'm anecdotally hearing about (and also sensing) frustration enough to drop off or away for a while.

I've seen independent versions of my suggestion that Facebook is pulling a QWERTY. A popular legend has it that the odd layout of the typewriter keyboard was designed to slow typists down so as not to jam the fragile mechanism of the newly invented typewriter. Maybe the new layout is to shed enough users or usage to allow the servers to catch up with the growth of the Facebook population.

Is the move made to make Facebook more Twitter-like, and if so this a defensive move against the migration of attention cycles from Facebook to Twitter?  Facebook could do better than to lame up its interface as a defense. Could Facebook by this type buy Twitter without ruining it?  Or could they better integrate Twitter using Twitter's APIs?  TweetDeck shows that you can integrate the two streams.  I use Facebook status to send more ephemeral updates among my friends and networks, and I use Twitter to enter my thoughts into a larger and more persistent and searchable universe.  I could see an interface within Facebook that could feed both.

On the positive side, I've appreciated better integration of messages from pages as well as friends into my newsfeed. So far.

Maybe the old Facebook interface will soon be resurfaced as "Facebook Classic",  and after about 25 years they can drop the "Classic".