Because maintaining N different interfaces is hard?

No matter how big you get, coordination between products is a hard problem to deal with (more social than technical).

Look, my view is this: it's not about maintaining N different interfaces.

Each news feed is totally personalized. This is done without having to worry about maintaining "N" feeds, it's built into the system, built into the approach.

Why is the design something that needs to be fragmented into buckets? This is a broader choice, accepting that all users need to be on some defined path.

You can measure and improve metrics without being concerned about the particular CSS file being delivered to each person.

Because maintaining N different user interfaces is hard. No matter if the underlying approach or data is the same, the user interface is different and from that point on you have to take them all into account when you make a change.

They're already doing it with their numerous Facebook apps for different platforms.

And it's hard.

And they're still doing a perfectly good job of it.

Presumably at a large expense.

Ridiculously large expense. And not always all that well -- it's just that most people don't use most of the platform simultaneously on different devices / stacks / versions, so they don't notice.

But apparently this is all "for the people". :-)

What on earth are you talking about?

The old design did not work across a set of devices. The new design works across a greater number of these device.

Please suggest an alternative.

note: device could mean anything from phone to small netbook.

Responsive Web Design...downvote me. RWD has come leaps and bounds. It's a news feed with pictures and comments.

Give people some sliders and a rest button in their preferences. I find the lack of visual configurability in web apps deplorable. I hate having no control over the look of things unless I install a restyling plugin.

I do find it a little ironic that JZ has taken to Medium to say this, since that platform shares a lot of the visual sensibility with the old FB feed - titles sitting inside the image frame, minimalist icon-driven design and so on.

Look into Responsive Web Design. Poster seemed to be questioning UI and UX choices for different screen sizes. Facebook is behind the curve on RWD...shocking.

Being able to save and display options or settings has been done...at scale.

Handling billions of requests everyday is hard. Scaling storage for millions of images is hard. Rolling out updates to a live platform twice a day is hard.

Lots of software development is hard. Whilst maintaining one interface is easier, they already serve and maintain different interfaces (Android, iPhone and web). What's another subset or two for the web? Responsiveness can only do so much. The article makes out as though the majority of users are using 'legacy' hardware... even if that were the case, there's still hundreds of millions of people that are using decent screens, peripherals etc, which they're not doing "whatever's best for the people" for.

I agree, I have always disliked how Facebook has never taken advantage of a decent sized screen.

Whether it would produce more engagement, who knows.

I was about to post exactly this. +1