Facebook redesigns Messages with side-by-side layout

Facebook announced  that it has redesigned Facebook Messages with side-by-side layout and easier search.

The new layout shows a scroll menu of all your messages on the left, with the full contents of a selected message on the right. The style is similar to many email clients.

Facebook says users can “bring conversations to life with multiple photos and emoticons.” Photos have long been a driving form of content for Facebook, so that’s no surprise but is a cool feature.

The social network claims it has simplified search by allowing users to find messages by sender name or keyword and made navigation easier by adding keyboard commands.

Facebook says the update will roll out to a small percentage starting today and will be available to all users in the next couple weeks.

Facebook Engineering also posted a note today explaining the technical aspects and challenges they faced in building the new message layout, an effort they dubbed “the mercury project.”

Today, it was reported that Facebook's plans to buy Instagram receiving the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's clearance. The decision now clears the path for Facebook to complete its purchase of the mobile photo application maker, making it the biggest acquisition in its history. Facebook announced plans to buy Instagram in a cash and stock deal for $1 billion in April next year.

Recently, an independent testing by Ars Technica revealed that photos deleted from Facebook were quickly moving out of its servers. Facebook had earlier admitted to being unable to erase user-deleted images from its servers, much to the chagrin of its users. Photos cached on the servers now stop being visible within 30 days of deletion.

In the course of its testing, Ars Technica found that Twitter and Flickr took a few seconds to remove the photos from their content delivery networks (CDN), while MySpace and Facebook were found to take very long to do so. MySpace took several months, Facebook over a year. Ars Technica adds that Facebook only removed the photos were deleted as a part of ArsTechnica's investigation. ArsTechnica said, "...numerous Ars readers wrote in with links to their own photos that they tried to delete, and nearly all of those remained online (in direct-linkable form) for three years or more".

Earlier this month, there were reports about Facebook making Timeline compulsory across the website starting from August 8. Before the scheduled switch would happen, users would be shown a preview of their profile pages. So far users had the option of choosing between the Timeline and the older format as per their liking. That, however, is set to change with the Timeline being made compulsory.