The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct in thinking the recipe Microsoft (MSFT) has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.

That would be Apple (AAPL), of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in, and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.

For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight too.

(You can view a preview of the site here.)

The launch is the first major upgrade of the MSN main page in–if you can believe it–a decade, part of an overhaul that the software giant has been doing throughout its money-losing online services division.

That has included the launch of Bing in May, which has been a success for Microsoft, adding a small amount of search market share and, more importantly, some much needed respect to its long-beleaguered consumer Web efforts.

The company’s online execs are trying to keep up the innovation momentum with the new MSN redesign and–as you can see below from the various screenshots–it is a major shift for the portal site.

Together, MSN and Windows Live have about 100 million unique monthly visitors, putting Microsoft typically third behind Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

The company hopes to do better with a fresher MSN, which is clearly aimed, first and foremost, at clearing up the clutter and link-heavy old MSN homepage.

MSN execs said the new main page has about half the “blue” links.

(See a video interview I also did with MSN exec Bob Visse about all of this here, along with other videos Microsoft did with its MSN staff.)

The top of the new page features a big image module, with inline video and drastically reduced topic areas–as BoomTown has previously reported–limited to news, sports, entertainment, money and lifestyle.

Under that is a more customizable news module, to which feature tabs can also be added, such as for the World Series or–prolonged sigh–Balloon Boy coverage.

On the bottom left is a much-goosed local module that resolves to beefed-up local sites, which is right next another section featuring Bing top searches.

Bing is present in every part of the site now, with Microsoft stressing it and using its structured data to improve the consumer experience.

That’s important for Bing search too, since MSN provides 45 percent of its traffic.

Communications modules are to the right, midpage and on the bottom.

Unlike AOL and Yahoo, which have added the ability to put third-party email on their homepages, only Hotmail is now available on the new MSN, although this is likely to change soon.

But perhaps the design element that will garner the most attention is the prominent placement of both Twitter and Facebook tabs in the bottom communications module, right next to one for Windows Live.

This allows users to update their status and get instant access to the status of friends and followers.

“We wanted to cut the clutter, while also giving users one convenient place to find what they need quickly,” said Scott Moore, executive producer of MSN in the U.S., its most important market, in an interview earlier today with me.

“People are overloaded with information and they wanted us to fix that, even if the service is not ours.”

The focus on Facebook and Twitter was simply due to intense user interest in the popular social networking sites.

“Facebook has popped and Twitter was really growing,” said Moore, who noted that there was the possibility of adding other third-party apps in the future.

A heavy emphasis on apps was a key strategy of Yahoo’s homepage redesign, officially launched in late July, which SVP Tapan Bhat touted at an meeting with analysts last week as having increased page views and engagement.

Advertising on the page is perhaps the most conservative part, with units that remain largely as before.

The new MSN homepage will begin rolling out now, eventually reaching about 10 percent of users by early next year. After that, it is expected to become widely available to U.S. customers and then go worldwide.

Here are screenshots of the changes to peruse (click on top three images to make them larger):

Old Homepage:

New Homepage:

Local Edition:

Twitter Section:

Facebook Section:

And here is the official Microsoft press release:

New MSN Designed to Be the Best Home Page on the Web

Fresh, new design delivers best of Bing, latest in news and entertainment, instant access to Facebook and Twitter, and customized local information in one place.

REDMOND, Wash.–Nov. 3, 2009–Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a preview of its most significant home page redesign in over a decade. The new MSN home page is designed to be the best home page on the Web, with powerful Bing search, the top news and hottest entertainment, and some of the most popular social networks–all in a fresh new look. The new home page will deliver comprehensive local information from the new MSN local information offering, MSN Local Edition, also unveiled today. Beginning today, anyone can preview the new home page at http://preview.msn.com. The new home page will begin rolling out today and become widely available to U.S. customers early next year.

Ninety percent of people surveyed find home pages such as MSN to be valuable, and they like the convenience of a comprehensive site.* Nearly 100 million people in the U.S. visit MSN every single month, and MSN added over 10 million new customers in the last year alone. However, today’s sites often fall short of top customer needs and many haven’t kept up with evolving trends. Extensive customer research highlights that people want less clutter and easier access to information and services they care about, including search services that help them make decisions easier and faster.

“Now is the time to clean up the mess on the Web–people need less clutter and less hassle to find what matters most to them,” said Erik Jorgensen, corporate vice president, Microsoft. “Microsoft is uniquely invested in search, media experiences and technical innovation. Combining these assets to deliver our new MSN home page is a tremendous win for customers and advertisers.”

The clean, new MSN home page cuts through the clutter with 50 percent fewer links than the previous home page and a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, money and lifestyle. The new MSN home page also embraces the latest customer trends by deeply integrating powerful search from Bing and providing easy access to Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live services, comprehensive local information and in-line video. Sophisticated technology powers the home page to deliver personally relevant information, and improved performance satisfies people’s need for speed.

New key features of the MSN home page include these:

* Innovative search technology from Bing. Deeper Bing integration on the new home page helps people make faster and more informed decisions and easily find the information they want from anywhere on the Web. Bing is deeply integrated as the core search service throughout the home page via key areas such as shopping, travel and local, and as a way of highlighting hot topics, trends or people.

* Information and news people care about. The new home page delivers against the No. 1 customer request–simplicity and ease of use–through its fresh design and smart categorization. In-line high-quality, top news and hot entertainment from trustworthy sources such as MSNBC, FOX Sports, Hulu and Hearst, and comprehensive local information provide a compelling one-stop shop for people to use as their home base online. More in-depth local information is offered on the new MSN Local Edition, which is the only local online source that smartly combines media with Bing search and provides access to real-time community news that is grouped by ZIP code.

* Convenient ways to communicate. Simplicity drove the clean integration of popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live “What’s New,” which aggregates up to 50 Web activities, including Yelp, Flickr, Pandora and more, onto the MSN home page. People no longer have to jump from site to site to update their status, tweets or see what their friends are up to; the new home page makes it easy to view and update in-line.

“Customers told us they want the latest information from their favorite sources, their friends and the breadth of the Web–and the new MSN home page delivers via a fresh new look and new features,” Jorgensen said. “Today is an important transformation for MSN, and it’s just the beginning.”

Yahoo is set to unveil a major marketing campaign to reset advertiser and consumer perception of the long-troubled company during Advertising Week in New York, which starts a week from tomorrow.

According to numerous sources BoomTown has spoken to about the campaign, Yahoo (YHOO) is–at least with advertisers–going to focus on stressing the size and scale of the Internet giant.

The details of the plan will be made public Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a press conference.

It will take place immediately after a keynote speech–titled “Yahoo’s Consumer Revolution…Round II”–that the company’s new CMO, Elisa Steele, is set to deliver on the second day of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference.

MIXX is a two-day event, run by IAB, focused specifically on online advertising.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is also going to be attending Advertising Week–during which all the major players in the advertising business gather in Manhattan for a series of events–for a plethora of meetings with big Yahoo clients.

It is likely she and several other senior Yahoo execs will be at the press conference, sources said.

That press event will also include Penny Baldwin, a well-known industry exec Yahoo hired as its SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management in July.

The main message Bartz is set to deliver is that Yahoo is a powerhouse unlike any others on the Web when it comes to online display advertising.

And, in fact, Yahoo–despite all the internal and external turmoil it has undergone in recent years–remains one of the largest sites on the Internet, and is the top player in what is also called graphical advertising, as well as online media and communications.

“The whole push seems to be to remind people of vibrancy of the brand and exactly how huge its reach is,” said one person who has seen parts of the presentation. “It is less Yahoo is back than Yahoo has never left.”

Sources also noted that Yahoo is likely to stick to its plan to push the idea of “your home on the Web” to consumers, which I had previously posted about earlier this summer.

The idea of the Silicon Valley icon being the key hub destination for Internet users does dovetail with pushing its size to advertisers–major marketing messages that will also likely cost a pretty penny.

They will have to–Microsoft (MSFT) has been in the midst of a $100 million campaign for its new Bing search site and will likely spend more when it unveils updates to the service, dubbed Bing 2.0–within the next few weeks.

The company showed the changes it showed to its own employees last week, which was the subject of much tweeting on Twitter.

Yahoo will apparently give more specifics as to the spend for the marketing push at the press conference.

But, many sources said, the company is already out in the advertising market now, buying tens of millions of dollars in advertising online and offline to hawk Yahoo in print, on television and elsewhere.

(Full disclosure: Sources said that campaign will include The Wall Street Journal network, which includes this site.)

“It’s dramatic,” said one source about the marketing outlay.

Since she got to Yahoo, Bartz has continually stressed the need to promote Yahoo products and services more, including in an interview last week on CNBC (you can see that longish video here).

And, in the July earnings call for Yahoo, Bartz said: “In addition, we’re hard at work on plans to reposition our most valuable asset: Yahoo’s brand. Our Q3 plans include an initial wave of incremental marketing spend which will increase substantially into Q4 and next year.”

Also, in a Q&A in the same call, she added more about the long-term nature of the spending on branding:

“The branding and our whole campaign of advertising is just starting; however you have to understand that this is an ongoing campaign so it’s not transient at least for the next year or so. We’re really going to move to reposition the Yahoo brand and Yahoo Company, so right now, consider that as cost that’s in the system.”

What Bartz and other Yahoo execs will likely stress less is search, due to the search deal Yahoo struck in July with Microsoft in which the software giant will take over the back-end technology and Yahoo will sell search ads for both companies.

The company will compete with both Microsoft and Google (GOOG) in garnering the search market still, once the partnership is approved by regulators, with Yahoo focusing on differentiating itself via innovative user interface, design, features and functionality.

Some of the best delivery of video on the Web right now is via the TED Web site–the Internet part of the well-known conferences where big thinkers express bigger thoughts, mostly focusing on technology, entertainment and design.

The organizers have long put those analog talks, called TEDTalks, online, but are now trying to make them even more accessible globally, starting today.

According to TED Media Executive Producer June Cohen, “every TED talk will have subtitles, an interactive, time-coded transcript, and the capacity to be translated by volunteers worldwide. We’ll launch with 300 translations in 40 languages (including lesser-knowns like Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, etc).”

Yipes! We were planning to translate All Things Digital in Pig Latin–for example: Ittertway isway away ecretsay otplay otay estroyday ethay umanhay aceray iavay Ashtonway Utcherkay–but nixed the effort due to cost.

In all seriousness, this “Open Translation” project by TED is of the kind that has become common across the Web as volunteers help sites go global, an important thing given that too many are still English-only.

Facebook, for example, has used this method to get its sites up quickly internationally.

Thus, a Wade Davis TEDTalk on endangered cultures is now in 22 languages, for example, while Barry Schwartz’s speech on the loss of wisdom is in seven, including Hungarian.

According to Cohen, every talk now has English subtitles, that time-coded transcript, translated headlines, the ability to browse for talks by language and language-specific URLs.

Here is an example of a page (click on it to make it larger):

Here’s the interesting explanation of the project, financially backed by Nokia (NOK), from the TED Web site:

A year in the making, the TED Open Translation Project brings TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. The project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators.

Generously supported by a visionary sponsorship from Nokia, the TED Open Translation Project is one of the most comprehensive attempts by a major media platform to subtitle and index online video content. It’s also a groundbreaking effort in the public, professional use of volunteer translation.

Subtitles and transcripts

Every talk on TED.com will now have English subtitles, which can be toggled on or off by the user. The number of additional languages varies from talk to talk, based on the number of volunteers who elected to translate it.

Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter’s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.

The interplay between the video, subtitles and transcript create what we call a Rosetta Stone effect. You can watch, for example, an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript. Click on an Urdu phrase in the transcript, and the speaker will say it to you in English, with Korean subtitles running right-to-left below. It’s captivating.

The translations

Rather than simply translate a few talks into a handful of major languages, TED and technology partner, dotSUB developed a set of tools that allow participants around the world to translate their favorite talks into their own language. This approach is scalable, and–importantly–allows speakers of less-dominant languages an equal opportunity to spread ideas within their communities.

To seed the site, a handful of talks were professionally translated into 20 languages. But all translations going forward will be provided by volunteers. At launch, volunteer translators had already contributed more than 200 published translations (with 450 more in development). These volunteers range from well-organized groups working together in their own language, to lone translators working individually and matched by TED with others.

At launch, the Open Translation Project included 300 translations, in 40 languages, including Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kirghiz, Korean, Macedonian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. Our translators hail from cities from Beijing to Buenos Aires; Tehran to Tel Aviv; Espoo, Finland, to Barranquilla, Colombia.

To help ensure quality, we generate an approved, professional English transcript for each talk. (This is the transcript upon which all translations are based.) Once the talk is translated, we then require every translation to be reviewed by a second fluent speaker before publishing it on TED. TED controls the final “publish” button. All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work. After publication, we provide feedback mechanisms for ongoing discussion or improvement around the translation.

Facebook cried uncle this afternoon–but just a teeny, tiny, little bit–by announcing in a company blog that it had made tweaks to its recent redesign in response to massive user unhappiness over the changes.

We’re talking very tweaky, though, and not back-to-the-future stuff. As in: The new look is here to stay.

That’s true in the Highlights section, for example, which Facebook said will again look more like the old News Feed.

And the social-networking site also said it would give users more control via better filtering tools of the stream of information that Facebook has focused on making more prominent–and which some say makes the service looks too much like a morbidly obese version of the hot microblogging site, Twitter.

It also said it was “working on a few design changes to help” users find what they want, another complaint about the new look.

But, as Product Director Chris Cox noted in a section of a called “Old Vs. New”:

“Since Facebook started in 2004, we’ve been through several redesigns. Each was built with the intention of making it easier to share and understand what’s going on with the people you care about. Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see.”

Translation: We’re not going back to Kansas, Dorothy, so get used to the new Yellow Brick Road motif.

Here is the whole blog from Cox, after the jump:

Responding to Your Feedback

by Christopher Cox Today at 5:01pm

Since we launched Facebook’s home page design, we’ve received thousands of e-mails, Wall posts and comments from you along with direct feedback from all of our friends and family. If you’ve already given us feedback, thank you. Hearing what you have to say, whether criticism or praise, helps us build a product that serves you better.

Whenever we build something new or tweak something old, our motivation is the same: to help you share with the people you care about and find out what’s happening with them. Before we launch any new product, it first must pass a process of design, development and testing with a more limited user audience. If those results are satisfactory, we then release it for all of you to use. We know that no amount of testing is as valuable as what you have to say. For this reason, we will always look to you, our users, to tell us what is working and what isn’t so we can continually make improvements.

Here are the top four things we’ve been hearing from all of you about the changes, and the areas where we’re focusing on improvements immediately and over the next several weeks.

Add more control and relevance in the stream

One of the great parts of Facebook is the ability to share and consume different types of content, such as photos, videos and notes, all in one place. We’ve heard from you that you want even more variety and control in your stream, and for it to update automatically. Some specific improvements we’re making are:

Live updating: One of the most common requests is the ability to see your stream update automatically. We will be adding the ability to turn on auto updating in the near future so you no longer need to refresh the page.

Photo tags: In order to surface more photos you might like to see, we’ll be adding photos tagged of your friends to the stream. This will happen in the coming weeks.

More choices for applications: We’ve heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream.

Currently, the content filters on the left screen allow you to select the types of content you would like to see. Over time, we’ll continue to give you more control over what’s in your main stream and how you consume it. We have the eventual goal of building filters that summarize this activity so you can see a more condensed view of what’s been going on. We’re also thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone.

See more Highlights

Right now, we’re making improvements to the Highlights section on the right-hand side of your home page. Highlights will update more frequently and will show you more content throughout the day to mirror more closely the content that the earlier News Feed provided.

Find things more easily

It’s important that you are able to find everything you’re interested in, or we’re not succeeding in giving you the right level of control. We’re currently working on a few design changes to help you find these things more easily, such as:

Moving requests to the top of the right column: Friend requests and event invites will be more prominent.
Easier way to create a Friends List filter: From the filters on the left, you will be able to create a new list of friends with which to filter the stream.

Application bookmarks continue to live in the toolbar at the bottom left of the page. You can quickly access your groups, events and other favorite applications from the bottom bar on any page.

Old vs. New

Since Facebook started in 2004, we’ve been through several redesigns. Each was built with the intention of making it easier to share and understand what’s going on with the people you care about. Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see. We keep in mind that there are 175 million people on Facebook, and everyone uses the site differently. We listen to feedback from our users, data on how the site is used, and our intuitions as builders and designers to create the product that provides the best experience across the board.

With the recent home page changes, we’re trying to present the right balance between what’s happening right now and what’s interesting over a longer period of time. We realize that both are important and getting them both right is crucial for the product to work. In the last few weeks, you’ve seen us shift the main emphasis towards real-time conversations and updates as the entry point to Facebook. We’re working hard to make this stream more valuable, and also to build out the richness and relevance of the Highlights section.

Your feedback means a lot, and we sort through everything we receive. The best way to give us direct feedback—to ensure that we can consolidate it—is through the feedback link on the home page tour. In the meantime, thanks for your support.

Chris Cox is Facebook’s Director of Product.

While at the TED conference last week, I asked a variety of people in attendance at the elite gathering which presentation had blown their head off. Figuratively, of course!

TED–for Technology, Entertainment and Design–had an eclectic range of speakers and tony digerati parties at its new location in Long Beach, Calif.

Onstage, there were a lot of talks about the awful state of the earth at TED, which sometimes feels like a four-year college in four days.

But there were also less-dire presentations, like the one from “Eat, Pray, Love” hit author Elizabeth Gilbert about genius, and another on how Brad Pitt’s head and range of facial expressions are now stored in a studio database for all eternity (as part of his work on the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”).

That’s a cold comfort amid all the global melting down, but BoomTown will not refuse it.

I also got reaction from some other TED attendees to the event. Included in the video are: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Foxmarks’ James Joaquin, Craig Donato of Oodle, Mozilla’s John Lilly, VC Dave Hornik, Steven Levy of Wired, entrepreneur Bill Gross (showing off a future car) and techie Linda Stone.

Here’s the video:

And here is a video of my tour of TED action.

Last week, BoomTown traveled to Long Beach, Calif., to attend the TED conference, a longtime gathering of digerati and others who have come to love its eclectic and outward-looking program.

TED–which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design–on its 25th anniversary moved here from Monterey this year for the first time, in order to accommodate its growing audience.

First held in 1984, Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation bought TED in 2001 from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman. TED has since grown to include an international conference, TEDGlobal; media initiatives, including TED Talks and TED.com; and the TED Prize.

The four-day TED2009, titled “The Great Unveiling,” included Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates unleashing a small swarm of mosquitoes in the hall, a long list of varied speakers and a whole lot of schmoozing.

Here is my belated video of the event. It features my All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg, scenes from inside and outside the event (including “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert onstage talking about genius), interviews with TED organizers Tom Rielly and Anderson, as well as my kids trying to steal entrepreneur Bill Gross’s futuristic car.

Here’s the video:

And here is another video, where some TED attendees tell me what presentation blew their heads off with knowledge.

Yahoo will begin testing out versions of its new main homepage to a minuscule number of users starting tomorrow, employing a design that more significantly allows users to customize the starting page in a way that essentially amounts to a kind of My Yahoo-lite for everyone.

The redesign is a huge and complex endeavor. According to comScore’s July stats, Yahoo (YHOO) has about 82 million daily U.S. visitors to its homepages.

Most of those visitors use the Yahoo main homepage, which is fully programmed by the company.

Making such a shift will also be a big perceptual deal for Yahoo, which needs to prove it has remained current and open, especially compared to faster-growing rivals like Facebook.

Yahoo has been trying to reinvigorate itself of late, after a disastrous takeover battle with Microsoft (MSFT) and a weakening of its business and its stock price.

Because of all this, the Yahoo brand has also doubtlessly been tarnished.

Thus, making a success of its new design is critical, and Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang has been touting the idea that Yahoo must be the “starting point” to the Web for users.

To respond to users who want to access information and services more quickly, the new streamlined homepage will be much shorter, be made up of more “snippets” and have links to outside email providers (initially, Google and AOL).

Most importantly, the new homepage will prominently feature a left-hand vertical bar, which has applications from both Yahoo properties and third-party services like eBay.

These apps can be added and subtracted easily. Eventually, there will be thousands of apps, from Yahoo and, after vetting, from outside developers.

(See screenshots below comparing the old Yahoo with three of the new ones.)

The changes will initially impact less than one percent of worldwide users in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and India. But they will be rolled out to a wider and wider circle over the next six months.

“People want broadcast and narrowcast at the same time,” said Tapan Bhat (pictured here), Yahoo’s SVP of Front Doors, Communities and Network Services, in an interview with BoomTown. “They want choices, but they also don’t want to do the work involved [in programming their own homepage].”

Thus, Yahoo apparently is going to give users both in its first major redesign since 2006, which it has been working on for two years.

The major components of the page will still remain close to the old one, but jazzed up and shifted around.

For example. the apps will be moved into the position where Yahoo services links used to be, and vice versa.

As before, there will be a main information module at the center of the homepage, “pulse” and news area on the bottom-right and -left, and search and navigation at the very top.

Bhat said the changes were made after a lot of research of user behavior and also after paying attention to key trends such as the widgetization of applications and the trend toward openness.

The new look is not aimed at the hardcore user, who might want to endlessly tweak the Yahoo homepage, although those options will remain for those who prefer them.

But, Bhat said, more people wanted quick access to things like email without having to launch apps. Instead, users will be able to see it all on the main page.

“It is not a dashboard approach of My Yahoo or iGoogle,” he said. “People are time-starved … so it is important to the user to get to their relevant daily information as quickly as possible without having to click around.”

Bhat said the rollout tomorrow will not be final and that Yahoo will keep making changes, depending on reaction.

“We don’t want 300 million people opposed to change,” said Bhat, who wrote a blog post on the changes here. “So, we are going to be listening hard.”

Here are screenshots (click on images to make them larger):

This is the home page that will be rolled out tomorrow

This is a home page that includes more outside apps

This is the home page that shows how email from Yahoo and Google and AOL would look

This is Yahoo’s current home page, as of tonight

Although about one-third of its user base–30 million people–has already switched over to its new design, which has been opt-in since July, Facebook will now officially start to move the entire site and the other 70 million Facebookers.

The changeover–which is not optional–will be complete in a few weeks, Facebook said.

I do like the new look, which is definitely cleaner and simpler, although it makes the experience a little more disjointed, since everyone’s profile is now cut up into tabs.

But it is nice to be able to better customize your information via those tabs, and it is easier to navigate (although search on Facebook still stinks, and BoomTown actually looks forward to Microsoft’s attempt to tame this savage beast).

Of course, there have been a lot of complaints from users, and there is even a popular “I Hate the New Facebook” group on the site (natch!).

And not all third-party application developers like it either, including new navigational changes that limit instant user access to as many applications as before.

But that’s life in Zucker-berg!

Over at AOL, a division of Time Warner (TWX), there has also been some primping going on, which includes an interesting integration of popular third-party emails.

Now it is easy to add access to non-AOL email accounts, such as GMail and Yahoo! Mail, which sit right next to AOL Mail at the top of its main AOL home page. (See the image above and click on it to make it larger.)

Other changes are coming soon, all part of AOL’s laudable attempt at openness, to keep its Web site as relevant as possible.

Not that it has a choice. Back in its glory days, AOL was the emperor of the walled garden strategy, which kept users inside well-tended online paths and out of the wilds of the Internet at large.

Which, if you think about it, seems as quaint as the faux political nostalgia around small-town life these days.

But, since you apparently can’t put lipstick on a pig (or a pit bull either!), Green Acres is no longer the place to be in real life or on the Web.