- 03.07.13
- 2:11 PM
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at today’s News Feed relaunch at the company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
Facebook redesigned its News Feed with bolder images and special sections for friends, photos, and music, saying the activity stream will become more like a “personalized newspaper” that fits better with people’s mobile lifestyles.
Unveiled this morning at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California (liveblog), the overhaul is designed to get people to interact more frequently with the News Feed, the stream of status updates and other information that greets each user upon login. Like a newspaper, the new News Feed has a prominent, bold front page and is divided into a host of new sections, showcased in a menu in the top-right corner of the screen: All friends, most recent, close friends, music, photos, following (for Facebook Pages), and games. The order of the menu will change based on which sections you drill down into the most.
Facebook executives said the new design would more readily grab people’s attention across a range of devices, from tablets to mobile phones to notebook computers. The design is intended to have the exact same navigation across all devices.
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in today’s [old] design it’s more like 500.”
“I think there’s a special place in the world for a personalized newspaper that can span the whole gamut” of content types, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the event. “As what we all share changes, the composition of News Feed should change as well…. We want updates from our friends but also from publications and businesses we care about, so this is the evolving face of News Feed.”
The new News Feed is designed to look the same across all devices. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in today’s [old] design it’s more like 500,” Facebook design director Julie Zhou said.
Facebook said the new design will begin rolling out to users today and trickle out slowly to give Facebook time to watch the results and further amend the design. “We wanted to get this out into people’s hands as soon as possible to see what’s working and not working,” VP of Product Chris Cox said.
It remains to be seen whether people will make use of the additional News Feed sections rolled out today, like “Following,” designed to let people see only posts from Page owners, typically businesses, news publishers, and celebrities. Internet users are notoriously reluctant to drill down into sectioned content, including on Facebook itself. Asked why Facebook thought this time would be different, Cox said the volume of content flowing through News Feed will make the sections well populated. Also, the menu will be highly visible, and finally “a lot of people asked for this [the sections]…. We have every expectation these will get used.”
The News Feed has been a work in progress since its inception, with Facebook engineers constantly updating the algorithm used to filter items from the feed and with designers regularly rethinking how best to present the river of photos, videos, news links, user posts, and life milestones.
For all its evolution, the News Feed generated more controversy than ever this past year as users raised questions about Facebook’s attempts to sell preferred placement in the stream. Prominent users like Star Trek icon George Takei, internet billionaire Mark Cuban, and New York Times columnist Nick Bilton criticized the social network for filtering their posts more aggressively with one hand while offering to ease the filter for money with another.
Facebook’s parallel moves of boosting filtering while also boosting efforts to sell an escape from that filtering seemed to some users extortionate, particularly after Facebook went public in May and came under Wall Street pressure to goose revenue. Facebook insists that News Feed filtering is tweaked only to make it more interesting to users and never to sell more advertising. The most recent public change to News Feed filtering, earlier this year, downgraded content if the user regularly hid or closed content from a particular source.
The News Feed is particularly important to businesses, celebrities, news publications, and others who own Facebook pages because it is the biggest source of traffic to those pages. The look, feel, and filtering of the News Feed thus affects the level attention and, eventually, money these page owners are able to extract from the Facebook platform.
A redesign like the one unveiled today could potentially boost the attention directed at posts from news publishers and businesses. Showing large images and videos, as the new design does, gives extra importance to professionally shot photos and videos like those regularly commissioned by news organizations and advertisers. At the same time, Page owners like news publishers now have their own substream on News Feed, helping them attain even more visibility.
At the same time, people come to Facebook first and foremost to connect with friends and family, and it may turn out that the splashy new look of News Feed will mainly serve to highlight pictures and videos of those folks. Ordinary people, after all, increasingly carry smartphones with high-resolution cameras and sophisticated image enhancement software attached. “What matters most to me is what my friends are doing and saying and seeing,” Zhou said. “The rest is just clutter.”
In the end, Facebook can tweak News Feed all it wants, and businesses can complain endlessly about how the stream filters their content, but the users will continue to do as they please.
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