Facebook created massive value and engendered passionate fans by popularizing an orthogonal, passive view into the lives of people you can't see every day. It was precisely the low time investment required to keep tabs on your friends (and the cute girl you met on the weekend) that made it addictive.
Sadly, by taking people who are used to an algorithm finding all of the important stuff — then, replacing it with a fire hose spewing endless crap — the average person will come away with less and be frustrated. In particular, getting rid of "your friend X became friends with Y" has removed the most viral aspect of their product offering.
By ditching all of their hard-won user experience wins and emulating a medium that requires visualization tools to effectively use, they’ve teleported us to the end of a race to the bottom. This is probably the worst part: Twitter and Facebook weren’t ever really competing! I use them both for completely different things, and there’s been precious little duplication of posting amongst my friends.
Just because Facebook status updates (which significantly predate Twitter, for the record) and tweets are both short, doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Ironically, there was a company that tried to beat Twitter by adding photos, videos, and file sharing. They were called Pownce, and after getting very little uptake, they pulled the plug in December.
I keep hoping that I’ll wake up and they’ll have reverted back to the old version. Mark Zuckerberg seems willing to compromise on his terms of service, but rolling back the homepage to an earlier version would be an order of magnitude harder.
Not to mention a serious splatter of egg on Zuckerberg’s face. A guy can dream though, can’t he?