Can you please tell us about any Facebook's alternative UI that does not "need work"? That something "needs work" is one of the most obvious comments that somebody could think of. Everything needs work.
It would be more constructive if you could provide us with some points that the appearance of that network could be somehow better.
What do you suggest? Often people take issue with the color scheme, which is understandable, a default theme for an open source project needs to find a reasonable balance between good enough to use and ugly enough that people want to change it. It's important that people have the desire to "brand" their node, so as to avoid confusion.
Appleseed is fully themable using CSS, and keeps a clear separation between logic and presentation, so any designer can make it look any way they'd like.
However, if you're speaking more to the actual user interface, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on what you find to be an issue.
Yes, I'm happy to provide my feedback. I am not a designer, so I cannot articulate on every detail that needs improvement. I was just pointing out that it took longer than normal to grasp the functionality of everything. The most obvious improvement is removing one of the two search boxes. Even though you mention that designers can improve it themselves, the default design and color scheme should be very strong if you want to scale beyond early adopters that are passionate about your product. So the Christmas color theme should be changed. Reading text in a red font strains the human eye, so I'd do away with that as well.
The startup I am at has gone through 16 completely redesigned home pages over the course of a year before landing on the one we're at now. We are always asking ourselves what could be improved and watching User Fly videos to see where users are getting confused. I'm only trying to provide food for thought to improve and enhance your product; a product that is off to a great start.
The screen-shot looks OK to me but I'm not a professional designer - the only thing that occurs to me is that div-sizes might be slightly awkward or the type might be a bit small.
One problem with any Facebook alternative where you have just one "reference application" implemented is that people will glance at the page and judge it by looks regardless of how configurable it is. That's a problem with any UI sadly enough.
I guess that's why I like the idea of creating layers and protocols to allow easy, multiple implementations. IE, my idea of five minutes ago - plugins for Drupal, Wordpress and Phpbb to ties multiple sites into a single large social network. The issue of design might then not be front-and-center.
Actually, Appleseed's framework abstracts out the user-facing code into a "foundation", which can be removed and replaced (and even inherited) without changing any of the underlying server-side logic.
So there's no reason I couldn't implement a radically different UI like this without changing any of the base code. Theoretically, you would even be able to switch between the UI's with a simple button.