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Facebook Announces New Newsfeed

Didit Editorial

storytelling facebookMarch 13, 2013: During  Facebook’s press conference on March 7, 2013, Mark Zuckerberg announced the redesigned Facebook newsfeed. He stated,  “We want to give everyone in the world the best newspaper we can.  It should have high-quality public content and socially relevant content, and to drill into any topic”, as detailed in The Register’s transcript of the event. Zuckerberg went to explain that 50% of content is now photo content and that 25% comes from public posts.

Chris Struhar, the tech lead on the project, walked the audience through the concept of the new multiple feeds menu that would be located at the top of the user’s home page.The new menu appears to be a way to make content feeds easily accessible to users. The feeds would be as follows: Friends feed (what all of your FB friends are doing), music and photo feeds, and a “following” feed so that users can follow companies and famous public figures. This seems to be an attempt to introduce a degree of Twitter functionality and culture into Facebook.

Julia Zhou, head of design for the project, explained that articles will get bigger photos, and that photo albums will be revamped. Many features are also planned to be imported from the phone and tablet FB applications. The goal is to give Facebook an entirely unified feature set across platforms so that when users change mobile devices, they can receive the same rich experience. Facebook’s ultimate goal seems to be to keep users engaged on the site longer and more often. This is a top issue for Facebook, as recent studies have shown that teens are eschewing Facebook for apps like Instagram and Snapchat.

“Getting Facebook out of the way” is a goal that Facebook’s Chris Cox emphatically stated. This will be accomplished by moving most functionality to the top of the page.  Another goal is that a user should be able to navigate through pages fluidly. There seems to be a drive to create one unified set of features across platforms.  Cox said that a “designer’s dream” was to be able to line up all the devices next to each other and to have the Facebook interface  “made of the same material”, so that a user can have a seamless experience as they upgrade or change devices.

Of course, the ultimate goal seems to be to ease delivery of advertiser content to Facebook users in a non-intrusive manner, and to rationalize the Facebook platform for the ever evolving stream of devices that have shorter and shorter development cycles.  Whether or not Facebook can deliver advertiser messaging to FB users without the users feeling put upon will be the significant challenge.  A related one is winning back the teen academic that used to be in love with Facebook.

A video of the press conference can be found here.

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