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Digital
Facebook revamps news feed design
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 8 March 2013
Have you been looking at your web-based Facebook news feed recently and thinking “well, this is all looking a bit dated isn’t it – I mean, my personal Facebook timeline is all snazzy and sexy and OMG, but no one other than me and my mum ever looks at that – why won’t that Zuckerberg make my news feed look a bit more 2013 too”? Yes? Well, we have good news for you. Ever added, “I really wish the ads were more prominent when I log into Facebook”? No? Hmm, well brace yourself.
Facebook is overhauling the design of its web-based news feed, the main thing most users of the uber social network interact with on a daily basis. Revealing the new design at a press conference in San Francisco yesterday, Facebook top man Mark Zuckerberg said the revamp would “reduce clutter” and present photos in a much nicer way (they accounting for 50% of all shared content via the platform) and make the news feed feature more like a “personalised newspaper” (which may or may not mean Bieber outrage, 1D sex scandals and horse meat obsessions will be prioritised).
Which is all groovy, though advertising will also have a more prominent positioning on the new look news feed, which is all part of efforts at Facebook to step up the variety of ad revenue streams on offer, now that the overvalued publicly-listed tech firm has to keep Wall Street convinced of its commercial sustainability and long term profits.
It remains to be seen how Facebook users respond to the upped presence of advertising materials, though it seems unlikely the change would be sufficient to actually turn off most committed Facebook users, and execs at the social network would likely tell you that ad-targeting technology is getting more sophisticated all the time, in theory making ads less intrusive even though they are – in terms of positioning – more intrusive.
