One of Facebook’s most important features is its News Feed, which is typically the landing page when you first enter your account. It’s where you can get to access all of your friends and “liked” pages and their status updates. However, it’s been two years since Facebook has updated this all-important feature, and if you ask me, it’s been a long time coming. You see, as people have become more social over the internet and as technology has made it possible to access a wider range of content than ever before, our social networking habits have change to go along with them.
This is what the newest Facebook News Feed redesign is all about. You may not have noticed it, especially if you’ve been a long time Facebook user for a few years now, but the News Feed has become a rather cluttered accumulation of information. Sure, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithms make it a bit easier for you to sift through all that by prioritizing only feeds from friends and pages you engage with along with promoted posts, wading through all that can still be a chore. And this has to change now that we’re sharing more information than ever.
The new redesign of the News Feed does that in a few interesting ways:
- The News Feed will become more organized with subcategories. You’ll have subcategories for things like Music, Photos, Games and Friends. This allows you to go through information you’re interested in wading through, rather than the seemingly random mess it is now.
- Photos and photo albums will soon start to look a lot bigger on your Facebook News Feed. This is because Facebook realizes that people are sharing higher resolution photos these days. Photos will be displayed larger, and photo albums will have a large cover photo of sorts, along with large thumbnails, making it easier for you to preview what the album is all about and if it’s worth exploring further.
- If something gets shared, all of your friends comments on that particular item will be aggregated into a single place so you don’t have to backread on their opinions.
Those are just a few of what I think are the most important features to look forward to. You might have noticed that the new-look News Feed looks pretty similar to the on your Facebook Android or iOS app. Like Facebook’s other new feature, Graph Search, the social networking giant will be rolling the redesigned News Feed very slowly, but if you want to experience it sooner rather than later, you can go here to signup for their waiting list.
