The new design reminds me more of twitter. And with the summary news feed directly below it, Facebook might be banking on there being enough status updates intermixed with other news feed items to help inflate the number of status updates. Who knows, maybe they are working on an algorithm that intermixes the status updates more regularly. We’ve already seen that the summary news feed isn’t chronologically in order. So this could be acceptable from Facebook’s point of view.

It still lacks status as an interesting dynamic element (even though it is prominent, why look at it each time you visit?), and (similarly) the direct juxtaposition of your status and the most recently updated statuses of your friends is still gone.

I can imagine this not only decreases updates but decreases users clicking on “see all” to see others’ updates — there’s less pulling them in to be aware of the module anymore. After awhile they can easily become blind to “what are you doing now?” versus new status messages from friends which always provided novel content.

xobni provides info about the sender of a message, including a bar chart of your communications with them over time.

I was more thinking that it would be for some automatically selected set of people to be shown in that box. So instead of showing just the most recent updates overall, it would also say how frequently they update their status. This would potentially remove the bias toward thinking that people update their status more frequently: though someone just updated their status, they may not update it very often.