Why didn’t I see it? It was so obvious. Facebook’s new redesign wasn’t some blunder on Facebook’s part. It wasn’t some clumsy misstep. It was the watershed moment, the jump-the-shark moment, where Facebook declared its serious intention to service Facebook’s advertisers and business partners over its users.

Any Facebook user surely has noticed the sudden crush of quiz results in their chunky, Fisher-Price-style “stream” over the weeks since the redesign. People groused, because it was annoyingly uninteresting to know where some dumb, time-wasting quiz had plotted what city your friends should live in. If you were like me, you tried to sniff out where in the new Facebook configuration you could turn off getting quiz updates. There was no such place. Here’s why.

Facebook needed to promise advertisers that use of certain third-party apps would be updated — no, advertised — to all of their friends by means of an automatic and mandatory status update stream, with no possibility of opting-out. Facebook needed to promise advertisers and its business partners (Facebook Connect enabled companies like Netflix) that if one friend used their service, all of their friends were going to know about it.

I wondered why the Facebook design was simpler than the previous stage, why so much functionality had been stripped away. I now have a dreadful suspicion it’s to hold you and all of your Facebook friends hostage, making you a captive audience for the surge of tacit user endorsements of Facebook apps and third-party services. If I was one such business partner, my first question to Facebook would be, “Is there a chance the users would change their settings so that our ads won’t get through?” Facebook’s response, “We’ll fix that.”

I had wanted a thing like Facebook to come along for a long time. As I was using the web over the years, I gave up on hosting all of my own content at my personal web site and scattered my stuff to sites that made it easy to post pictures, videos and blogs for my friends to see (flick, YouTube and MySpace respectively). Rather than use Facebook’s apps for my favorite movies and books, I waited for sites like Goodreads (where the books I was currently and just recently read had already been painstakingly entered with care) to somehow dovetail with Facebook automatically, so when I updated one site, it would update on Facebook. How clever that will be! I thought.

Same with Netflix. I’d been using Netflix for years, so I eschewed the Facebook apps where I could list favorite DVDs I owned and rate them. Why not just have a thing where Facebook knows my Netflix account already? I thought. Netflix has finally made its site enabled with Facebook Connect — just such a service — where any time I rate a movie on Netflix, my rating is automatically sent into the stream of every one of my Facebook friends. I gave it a dry run this morning, rating a recent Hemingway doc I had watched, then went to Facebook to watch it magically appear. When it did, I was depressed to see that my rating looked just as annoying and unnecessary as so many friends’ dumb quiz results.

Time was my rating might have gone to my Wall and sat there quietly, unobtrusively, noticeable only to someone who bothered to click on my profile and see what I was up to. But now, just like so much quiz fluff, it’s shoveled into Facebook’s new stream indiscriminately, rendered in the same large, childish font as my last status update, one more block of… nothing. Of crap.

This is where Facebook has let us down. In promising this busy stream of updates, they’ve assigned the same importance to my click of three stars for Hemingway with anything else I do on Facebook. The app that will publish this blog to Facebook gets exactly the same screen time as that one click to say “I Liked It.” With no ability to tailor, prioritize or emphasize content, the stream becomes a dull, dreary continuum of noise. The stream becomes a wash. It becomes all colors all the time, and that doesn’t paint a picture, it paints a ever-growing rectangle of blackish-brown.

In fashioning itself to please its business partners, Facebook has removed the configurable connectivity so many of its users cherished. The experience they claim to foster and respect has taken a backseat to their business model. By putting their business interests first they have diminished their user’s experience and they know it. But they don’t care. They’ll pretend they are listening to your feedback, but they won’t be. They’ll be cramming advertising down your throat. And I will have cheered them on all the way.

Guess I’ll have to try spending time with my friends in the real world again. Who wants to get a coffee?