Facebook is due to hold a press event at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, later today.
Many blogs and tech sites have been trying to guess what Facebook may announce. However, it now appears, quite literally, that Facebook will announce a redesign for the social network. TechCrunch report that they have confirmed with a source that this will be purpose of the announcement.
At least one area of the Facebook website has already been tweaked. It is being reported that Chat, for some people, has moved to the bottom left of the window rather than the right and that it will feature larger user images than the current version of chat.
Whilst Chat has not moved to the left for me yet, it has now got larger pictures.
TechCrunch understand that the redesigned Facebook will look similar to the Facebook Places pages. Facebook Places pages have the navigation and information under the page"s display picture and no tabs across the top. If the redesign follows this design it will mean that the tabs currently found at the top of a user’s Profile page and a user"s app will be moved below the user’s profile picture. There will no doubt be many other tweaks across the site if this proves to be correct.
It is thought that for the past two months, Facebook has been in “lockdown” to pull off this redesign. The “lockdown” sounds like a way to accelerate the employees by encouraging and firing them up to work around the clock. There is even a Facebook Group for the lockdown set up by Mark Zuckerburg himself.
In the past there has been much resistance to radical Facebook changes which is why over the past few months the company has only made small incremental updates and tweaks. It remains to be seen what reaction will meet this new redesign.