I recently read a Mashable opinion article titled "Facebook is Getting Too Damn Complicated" - this got me thinking. Is it really that there are just too many features that they're packing in there, or is it something else? My opinion, it's that they've lost their essence. Facebook was about connecting the people you know, how? By ‘friending’. When the like button came around, it became a logical extension of that for brands, whereby you could connect to the brands you know and ‘like’...

Fine, that works. But now they've added another layer to Facebook relationships where you can subscribe to people you’re not even friends with. And that definitely doesn't feel like an extension of what I thought Facebook was. In fact, the latest Facebook update has sort of become the anti-thesis of the original Facebook. With all of the new updates, Facebook has created dramatically different relationship dynamics that do not seem to be well defined in the scope of Facebook version 1.0.

Now you can friend somebody, subscribe to them, and you can like a page (oh, and don't forget - you can join that Groups thing that never really caught on). That's pretty complicated for one social network if you ask me.

Then comes the problem of too many features and confusing privacy settings. With new application slapped onto the news feed, ticker, AND friend lists. The loss of Facebook's essence has overloaded on features and become a sort of un-user-friendly mess that’s a headache to navigate.

As with most of Facebook’s updates, we’ll all adapt and forget what the Facebook version before this one looked like in a matter of months. But will we ever truly be comfortable using it again? Not to mention with all this talk of EdgeRanking and the new hierarchy on news feeds how much of Facebook and the brands we really like are we missing out on these days?

By: Maya Mikati