[1]“The news feed is one of the most important things we’ve built,” announced Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a press event on Thursday, to announce that the social networking site will be giving its popular news feed a brand new look and feel, one that is aimed at making users stick around in the website for more time than they usually do.
We are all familiar with the page that opens up when we click ‘Home’ on the top right corner of our Facebook accounts — the one in which we are able to see the activity of all our friends, what they’ve liked and shared, activity from pages we have liked and more. While most of it in the present design is mixed, Facebook has one planned to change that.
Dubbing the news feed as ‘the most personalised newspaper,’ Zuckerberg added that “how we’re all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes.” Just like a newspaper is structured in sections with the front page having the most important news and separate sections devoted to sports, entertainment, politics, and other categories, Facebook is essentially trying to let users create their own, personalised sections.
The revamped news feed has three major updates – multiple feeds options, bigger images and mobile consistency.
Personalised Feeds
The most important part of the new design is the content-specific feeds. The column to the right of these feeds will let users choose to view only feeds from friends, photos, music, games, pages and celebrities you are following and the like. Ads, birthdays, requests, and other items that had previously been placed there have been pushed downward. And now, a chronological view is available too.
Bigger, Likeable Images
The new look is a radical departure from the Facebook of old. It’s a mobile-inspired clean, navigable design. When it comes to the feed itself, the focus on stories is now much more visual, with shades of Instagram and Google+ in the new feed.
Mobile and Tab Consistency
The redesign has been made consistent across all devices, borrowing cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets and now has a new side navigation bar and more white space.
The new news feed represents the first major overhaul of Facebook’s core service since the launch of Facebook Timeline at the end of 2011. The feature, however, isn’t available for everyone yet, as Facebook will be rolling it out in phases. For now, you can go to facebook.com/about/newsfeed, click the green ‘Join Waiting List’ button at the bottom of the page and well, wait for it.
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[1] http://archive.asianage.com/markc1jpg-671