Facebook introduced an update to News Feeds today. The idea behind News Feeds is to have a personal newspaper with all the content you are interested in one place. When it was first introduced according to Facebook, the News Feed was mostly text, with some images. Now News Feeds are primarily visual with images and videos becoming increasingly important. Facebook is trying to redesign News Feeds to meet what people are looking for today.
The first thing they announced was that images are now going to be front and center and more vibrant. This also means that ads will be more prominent, which is something businesses have been looking for. When a video shows up on your timeline, it will show who of your friends have shared the video. Facebook will also allow you to have choices of news feeds, so now you can just see all the music your friends are sharing and also the post from artist that you are interested in one news feed and another feed for all the public pages you are following. The sidebar will have a list of your feeds, the feeds will be listed by how you use them, with the most used at the top. Facebook News Feeds will also be consistent on how it looks and works over various devices. It will also be more responsive to the size of the device.
Facebook is letting a few people see the new News Feed first and then as is usual for them they will slowly release over time to the public. You can request to get in early by signing up on the wait list, however I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to get in. I have to admit I looking forward to the ability to choose various feeds based on what I want to see at that time. I do wonder how they are going to integrate interest list into the new news feeds, they might have said but I missed it. I do know one thing that once it is released to the public there will be people complaining about the changes and those who will complain because it hasn’t changed enough.