But you've ignored my point- their redesign has nothing to do with competing against Facebook. They are standardising their design across all their sites, that's all.
I don't understand in what way it feels like Amazon, or how it is less tactile than the old design. Seems exactly the same to me.
Again, the standardization was required to keep up with the Google+ design - a direct Facebook competitor. Larry Page even went out to declare that all of Google will now revolve around 'social' - and we are beginning to see that already. The social features in Google reader are broken and crappy. While the same social features are absent from Gmail for now, the design persists, only because Google+ demands it.
I don't understand in what way it feels like Amazon, or how it is less tactile than the old design. Seems exactly the same to me.