Facebook Restructures News Feeds

Allows Users to Switch Between Two Different Views

(CNET)  Facebook members will start to see a new look for their home page "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.

"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."

This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring, likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its home page news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.

Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. PDT, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."

Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired home page: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there, too, but Deng said Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.

The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."

[Djjeffe]

The new FB update is complete garbage. I feel the developer did not take into account that the major appeal of FB (at least for me) is that you can see what is happening in real time, and you can control and only allow what is interesting to you to enter your newsfeed. Now that option has been taken away and the newsfeed is cluttered with irrelevant information, and as for the "other" newsfeed, now a computer is deciding what we should see from the people in our networks. I hope they change it back, or at least give us back control over what we allow into our newsfeed....

[Stormyshewolf]

The new structure of the newsfeed sucks! It does ***NOT*** give "live" updates on the live feeds tab! It does NOT update continuously as product manager Peter Deng told CNET News!!!!!!!!!! The old feed was much better and everyone is complaining about this. Why doesn't the product manager or the figureheads at facebook have an official page or something to take our complaints and see that the users there do not like this??????
Will FB lose advertisers when users start deleting their accounts and there isn't as much traffic on the site??????

[Gene_White]

I agree. The new version does nothing but fill my screen with stuff I have no interest in at all.

To bad FB doesn't care enough to allow us to contact them about this.

I agree with california64. Leave it alone.

I am considering deleting my account because of the frustration of viewing garbage that I don't care to see.

[california64]

and the new version sucks...facebook keeps morphing and it forgets, we use the service because we like it NOW. Leave it alone. Not broken, doesn't need fixing.