I love Scoble, but sometimes his breathless fanboyism posts are off the mark. For example, Scoble says about the Facebook redesign:

When Zuckerberg announced these changes a couple of weeks ago I told him he was brilliant and that his moves this month would be remembered for decades. Decades.

Here’s why:

Let’s say you’re walking down University Ave. in Palo Alto, California in a couple of years (or, really, any street in the world) and you’re hungry.

You pull out your iPhone or Palm Pre or Android or Blackberry or Windows Mobile doohickey and click open the Facebook application. Then you type “sushi near me.”

It answers back “within walking distance are two sushi restaurants that more than 20 of your friends have liked.”

Wait a second. “Friends have liked?”

Did Scoble just mention ANYTHING that Facebook does? Facebook cannot even recommend to me the correct pieces of content I want to see from my friends ("Highlights" was absolutely useless), much less recommend or mine information about where I've been eating.

And as far as I know, it does no geolocation at all.

And even if they were working on it, who do you think would get to that functionality first - Google or Facebook? (Goes to buy some GOOG stock)

Yes, the Facebook redesign sucked for a variety of reasons: aesthetics & duplicated functionality (so do I go to Highlights, my Feed, or my Friends > Profile Updates to figure out what my friends have updated?), and a step back from finding useful information (right now, my Twitter + Facebook feeds are nearly identical - tell me why I'd go to Facebook now???)

Unfortunately, unless Facebook sees a Tropicana-esque dropoff in traffic due to their own ineptitude, it doesn't really matter, does it?

. . .

That last point warrants more highlighting. Tropicana tried to revamp their juicebox branding ... it was generally reviled and considered stupid, but they went for it anyways. Well, guess what?

After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars. On Feb. 23, the company announced it would bow to consumer demand and scrap the new packaging, designed by Peter Arnell. It had been on the market less than two months.

And lest you blame the economy:

The entire refrigerated-orange-juice category posted flat unit sales and a 5% decline in dollar sales during the period.

Think about it. The juice didn't change. Just the packaging. And that led to a 20% drop?! Wow.

. . .

In one of those "what if" hypothetical conversations, one of my friends was asking me what it'd take for me to work at a company like Facebook - everybody has a price, right? My assertion was that I'd never ever work for a company like Facebook - it was clear after the hiring binge last year its best years were behind it.

My opinion was vindicated a few days later. Why would I work for a company that (a) consistently pisses off its users (b) has fickle executive leadership and (c) is so big that you'd hardly have an influence in the product? No amount of money would bring happiness to a job like that.

Consumer sites are so trendy anyways - even the unassailable ones eventually come crumbling down (high pressure!). Facebook, while it has traffic growth and "profit" (although with $500 million in the bank, one would think it wouldn't be hard to turn a profit, especially when Microsoft is bankrolling your ads - has anybody even SEEN a useful ad on Facebook yet?), will eventually stop being considered so awesome.