Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.<p>> Similarly, there’s a logic to giving Paper some more features, or “bloat,” as engineers derisively call such additions. Although it’s awkward to cram more information into a hidden tab on Paper — if birthdays are so important, why aren’t they in Paper’s main news feed? — the additional information also helps Paper live up to its billing as a place for news and stories from your social graph. For some people, birthdays and invitations are a vital part of that news stream, even if, for others, such information is trivial or better placed in the core Facebook app.<p>1. The Events and Birthday features were planned before Paper was announced. It's not feature bloat, it's a "second release" feature planned ahead of time.<p>2. Paper is optimized for a high-quality reading experience, especially longer content, as evidenced by the meticulous attention to detail in the text rendering and the horizontal scrolling. Birthdays would take up a lot of space in the story stream for relatively little content (and how would you order it within the feed, anyway?). Look at the birthday indicator on Facebook WWW, and tell me a name and three words are worth a screen-sized card in the stream. I would be very skeptical.<p>3. Birthdays arrive regularly and in chronological order. The Notifications jewel is the best place for these things - people also visit it regularly and there's a chronological ordering to it.<p>As for Nearby, the argument is flimsy. Changing strategy doesn't have to mean sabotaging in-flight development. Perhaps Nearby was developed before or during planning for the shift to the new strategy.