By now a large portion of Facebook users are seeing the new homepage redesign as it is slowly rolled out to everyone.

While it is cleaner and makes more productive use of the top bar (at the same time making it thinner) it tucks and tweaks some features. I won’t go as far as to say things have been made hard to reach, but rather placed in some locations that we’re not quite used to. In at least one instance I’ll point out though, one feature has been peculiarly hidden.

Here’s the new bar:

Note the icons now near the Facebook logo representing Friend Requests, Messages, and Notifications. (Try and look past the fact that the “Messages” icon is more reminiscent of what most iconography uses for “chat” functions.) These icons bring your Friend Requests and Inbox interaction to closer parity with Notifications, where a drop-down gives you a preview of what’s waiting for you and a red-number indicator of new items.

At all times you can still get “Home” and to your profile with the righthand links.

Right, but where did my “Friends” go?

This is a harder question to answer. In some ways, finding friends and seeing lists is simple, living in the lefthand column like this:

But very quickly those of you who use Friends Lists may notice that from here you can’t get to that page where your friends were all lined up next to your lists and you could easily edit who was in what lists, etc.

So, where is that page now? It’s accessible in the drop down on the upper right- under “Account.”

There you’ll find, “Edit Friends,” as well as all of your other preferences, settings, privacy options and more. Convenient that they are all grouped like that, but odd that I can do an awful lot with my friends as individuals and lists over on the left-hand except for access this one page.

Let’s look at that left-hand list again:

Some of these are redundant considering the same icons live in the top bar. But it looks like one big one is missing: where’s video?

Here it is:

It’s under… photos? This would be the most boneheaded navigation change in my opinion. As strange as the Apple/Mac reality that iTunes (a music program) plays video but iPhoto does not. Video needs its own icon. Period.

Strangely enough in this lefthand menu you can’t delete or move around every icon – only some of them. (I can get rid of Ads & Pages if I want, but not Games?)

All in all, most of the new changes make logical sense, but they’ll still take some getting used to.

-Dean (@dbrowell)