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Yesterday on their developer’s blog, Facebook answered a number of questions that have recently arose regarding the new tabbed profile slated for release this April. We previously published the screenshots of the future look:

Most notable amongst the clarifications is the were the reasoning behind combining the ‘Wall’ and ‘Mini-Feed’ features and the revelation that there will be new API calls and FBML tags. Most of the other questions regarded placement of different profile elements and where applications may appear on the new profile.

Regarding the consolidation of the Wall and Mini-Feed, though, they provided a detailed eplanation as to why the move was made:

The profile is a place where a user might catch up with a friend by reading a new Wall post, or by seeing a Mini-Feed story with pictures from a trip they just took. While the Wall and Mini-Feed may seem like two totally separate things, both can contribute towards telling a more complete story. The idea behind combining the Wall and Mini-Feed is to put all of the most important information in the same place, so users don’t have to constantly search around to keep up with their friends. We’ve posted a screenshot detailing this on the Facebook Profiles Previews Page (become a fan of this Page so you can stay up to date on the improved profile). The new “Wall” now consists of Wall posts as we currently know them, but also stories users once saw in their Mini-Feeds. This allows friends to write on a user’s wall, directly after other content they might find interesting. The goal is to make a cleaner, more relevant Wall that compiles the most relevant information about the people a user cares about. And given the Wall’s popularity with users, we are working out a way to easily filter down to just Wall posts from a friend’s profile.

This is probably a fairly smart move for Facebook to make here. On the one hand, the Mini-Feed is particularly polluted with all sorts of application notifications of all sorts, and is almost in-decipherable these days. Adding more to that noise to that stream may seem counter-intuitive, but as they say, the Wall is a favored feature for most social networks, and Facebook is no exception. To put an attractive data set into the Mini-Feed may return a bit of attractiveness to the feature (and encourage you to pay more attention to those Project Beacon advertisements!).

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