Within the next several days, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook will officially roll out its timeline feature for all of its 800,000,000+ users.  Just weeks after installing the Twitter-esque live news feed in the upper right Facebook users will find their personal profiles changed once again as a gigantic cover picture and a multilayered column layout stretching all the way back to the users birth appear on their monitors.

Meanwhile, Twitter, the other major social network, will remain exactly the same.

This has been an ongoing trend between the two companies.  While Facebook’s design has drastically changed since its inception in 2004,  Twitter’s basic framework has remained almost entirely unchanged.

These approaches to interface design represent fundamentally different philosophies at these companies.  On one hand Facebook’s frequent changes represent a willingness of the company to evolve and take risks to keep its users active and engaged.  Meanwhile, companies believe like Twitter believe that frequent layout changes can make a website hard to read and view constant redesigns  as a cheap gimmick to keep users coming back to the site just to keep up.  If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Or so the reasoning goes.

Neither strategy is a guarantee of success.  News site DIGG tried to garner more viewers by launching a massive redesign of the front page, but the plan backfired and crippled the company.  Viewership declined by 26% in only two months, and has continued its freefall ever since, as evident here.

The former social networking heavyweight site Myspace suffered from the exact opposite problem.  When Myspace used to outnumber Facebook in terms of users it was too content to rest on its laurels.  The pages became overly stale and users became bored with the sight and worried that Myspace was failing to fix numerous privacy concerns, as evident here.

Fortunately for Facebook and Twitter, their different philosophies have worked for them.  There are currently over 100,000,000 Twitter users with an additional 300,000 joining every day while Facebook has opened about 800,000,000 accounts for people and businesses.

Twitter and Facebook reveal that how a homepage looks and how often that look changes is important for an internet company, but what is even more important must lie beyond the homepage.