Facebook rolled out an updated News Feed on Thursday, aiming to provide a "personalized newspaper" featuring updates both from friends and selected news sources.
The new News Feed will be slowly rolled out to users over the next few weeks. (To get it early, you can click this link to join the waiting list.)
The new News Feed look steals ideas from Facebook's mobile apps, which have focused on prominently showcasing photos. To that, Facebook has added a bevy of new feeds, or ways of displaying updates on your page. These include distinct feeds for music, photos, games, updates from "close friends," and those from people and Pages you follow. Facebook also lifted the left-hand nav bar from its mobile application and added it to the Facebook desktop, so that people won't have to navigate back through the Facebook home page to move through the site.
"News Feed is one of the most important services that we've built," Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at an event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. "It take all the things that your friends are doing and puts them all in one place."
Photos Take Prominence
Probably the most important content that friends share within the News Feed is photos. Zuckerberg said that about half of the average content within the News Feed is photos, which will be displayed in a larger format, along with albums. That, unfortunately, will include image-driven ads.
Facebook has also come under fire for allegedly suppressing content that wasn't promoted in the News Feed. Earlier this week, Nick Bilton of the New York Times essentially accused Facebook of encouraging a pay-to-play scheme. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban also said he had been encouraged to pay Facebook to increase the number of people who would see his posts.
Facebook denied the charges, saying its algorithms have made recent attempts to focus more on higher-quality stories, and that engagement was actually up for social media figures with more than 10,000 followers.
More to come.
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