2008 was definitely the year that social was brought into the mainstream. Nearly all big social networking sites have redesigned to accommodate their quickly growing audiences, while the big portals have incorporated many social features into their front pages.
It’s still too early to say whether many of these are good or bad. Will Yahoo’s drastic home page redesign be good or bad for them in the long run? Will Facebook’s new look, which stirred quite a bit of opposition from their users, eventually turn out to be a good move? Let’s take a look at what the big boys have done and how it’s worked for them so far.