Furthermore – making status updates blend in visually with other types of posts is blinding if you have more than a few dozen very active friends.

It’s a far less useful tool now — home page especially.

Less useful and far less clean — so pretty means squat.

This is a fine opportunity for some other social network who understand the ease of keeping in touch, seeing useful info at a glance and presenting ads in a way that’s engaging but not FORCED, sleazily interwoven too much in your personal friends’ stuff.

We “get” you gotta keep the lights on and pay the bills like we do, but this isn’t the way.

With the old version, I used to take care to provide large images on a note that I wanted folks to pay attention to. Whenever I put up a new album of photos, the first one uploaded would appear on the profile nice and large, as a way to announce the fact. Text sizes made sense relative to the sorts of posts they were connected to.

Now everything is jammed into three type sizes and one image size, with the repetition ad nauseum of oversized avatars in rounded corners (rounded corners?? hey, welcome to 1994).

If fact the utter ugliness and confusion of the profile page is why I’ve hardly posted anything since the change. Today I actually considered using all caps for the more important posts, just so they’ll stand out above the general visual racket.