I’d have thought not only are they increasing the problems they have in delivering this feed, but they’ve also cut down on click throughs? I see less information about my groups – I used to waste many minutes… now… almost forgot they exist!

Well argued post, I too miss the with_others page, but it was a hard promise to keep. One of the arguments I heard in favour of the throw away nature of the previous facebook status page was that it gave comfort in plausible deniability. People could justifiably say “no, I didn’t see your update”, though now volume for many people deals with that conveniently, be it Twitter or Friendfeed. Flickr in fact has always had this, as the recent from contacts will only show you a maximum of five pictures or only one. It is a healthy thing allowing for social space in relationships. I can understand why there is such a strong reaction to the new FB, it feels a bit overbearing.

One thing that saves them a bit of hassle is that conversations on a particular topic are often confined to the comments of a status update. That’s one, easily cached, blob of data visible to anyone who can see that person. In Twitter’s case a person only sees the parts of the conversation they’re subscribed to, requiring the assembling of several bits of data.

The premise of your post – that the comprehensive single-user perspective feed is inherently unscalable – is debatable. It’s difficult, yes, but clearly Facebook have found a way to do it. Would they (COULD they) have deployed it if they hadn’t figured it out? They have so many users now that they have to get it right or it just won’t work. The fact that their new homepage is up and running shows they’ve cracked this issue, putting them technologically ahead of much of their competition.

That said, I have quit using Twitter and Facebook recently due to concerns about the nature of these micro-conversations, and their psychological effects. (I’m preparing a post on this, so I won’t go on about it here.)