Facebook Announces A New Look For News Feed

news

7 Mar

Facebook has unveiled a new look of the News Feed, radically redesigned to give the site a much-needed overhaul. Clutter has been reduced, bigger images are now incorporated and greater customisation is possible, which the company hopes will keep user attention and attract advertisers.

Each story type has been rebuilt from the ground up to highlight your content better, and bring the user interface (UI) design more in-line with the News Feed on mobile & tablet applications. Photos, which make up for nearly 50% of all News Feed posts, are now more prominent.

The side navigation have been all but removed, except for a column of icons accessible by dragging the screen across, again taking interface cues from mobile. Overall, it looks more visually appealing than the current version, and looks more functionally compatible with Graph Search.

In terms of functionality, they have introduced several new feeds to explore in addition to the same News Feed you have today (news feed-ception?). These act primarily as filters to get to what content you want:

- All Friends - a feed that shows you everything your friends are sharing
- Photos - a feed with nothing but photos from your friends and the Pages you like
- Music - a feed with posts about the music you listen to
- Following - a feed with the latest news from the Pages you like and the people you follow.

Facebook are making this available "slowly over the coming weeks on web and mobile;" but visit www.facebook.com/newsfeed if you want to add yourself to the waiting list and get the functionality early. Updates are coming to iOS first, with Android coming "soon after."