Facebook Layouts

If you don't want to read this lens and you just want to skip to the plug-in, then you can download it from here Facebook Layout Plug-in

Facebook is the worlds largest social network. Everyone uses it, and there is good reason for this. It's fantastic. You can network thoughts, photos and videos with your closest friends, and play games online with them too. But lets face it, your profile design is pretty impersonal. It's functional, and useable, but it doesn't blow your socks off or anything. That's what this page is all about, how you can customize the look of your profile, like you can with your BEBO profile or Myspace page.

The truth of the matter is, out of the box, Facebook is not style-able. You can't just download themes, and layouts and install them like you can with Bebo or Mysapce. The creators of Facebook, want their platform to be consistent, and easily useable by everyone, so they feel that having all profiles looking the same means that it is easier for everybody to use. This is true. They also feel that this makes Facebook more accessible to more people. This is true also. All of my daughters grandparents have Facebook accounts, and lets just say they are not the most tech savvy people out there, so it must be easy to use. So because of these style limitations our customisation options are limited.

Here are your options:

The first point of customisation you can look at is Facebook expressions. This is an application that allows you to have a wallpaper type module on your profile. It only fills one small area of the profile, and doesn't style of the whole page, but is ok for adding some style to your page. The application has 800,000 + users, but this isn't huge when you consider that as of February 2010, there are more than 400 Million active Facebook users. Click here to install the application on your profile: Facebook Expressions

The next option to consider is using browser plugins. What these do is overwrite style settings in your internet browser to display a different screen design. This is cool, because what you see will have your own stlying, however, regular users still don't get to see your cool design.
One of the best options for plugins is Chameleon Tom. It supports internet explorer and Firefox. Click here to install it.

And that's it. Not much to speak of in the world of Facebook customisation. However, I will be adding to this lens from time to time if there are any new developments.

Why would anyone want to change they Facebook layout?

People are pretty precious when it comes to the layout of their Facebook accounts. Whenever the overall design changes, people get all up in arms, and start creating new groups on Facebook to get the old design back etc.

Watch the video below which looks at why people get so upset whenever the change the default Facebook layout.

I think the standard design is ok, certainly better than the standard Bebo or Facebook design. But some more styling options would be good, wouldn't they? Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts about Facebook layouts. Do you like the new one? Do you like the old one?