Facebook unveils new redesigned news feed

A special event took place today at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, during which Mark Zuckerberg announced a major redesign to Facebook’s News Feed in order to make pictures, places, apps and other information more prominent. The changes aim to make the Facebook News Feed more appealing to the users by replacing the abundance in text with images, wherever possible.

Along with your directly uploaded photos the changes will also be applicable to third party apps like Instagram, giving users quick access to your albums. Other items like places videos and news articles will also be displayed more prominently.

Another important addition is filters on the sidebar – ‘All Friends’ will display all recent friend activity in chronological order, Photos will do the same for photos while Music will display concerts taking place around area your friends live. Facebook looks to have built the new News Feed around your friends and family, which is always useful.

Another new section in the News Feed is ‘Upcoming Events’ which allows you to look at the events which your friends are attending, and you wont have to head over to the Events section to view this anymore.

One feature we are curious to know about is how information from Pages will be displayed. We hope that Facebook will find a way for users to separate their Page feeds from the Friend News Feed. Page feeds can cause a lot of clutter at times, and while it maybe important for users to get updates from Pages, an added filter may not be such a bad idea.

Facebook also claims that the update unifies the experience across the web and mobile platforms. While we do see similarities between Facebook’s new design and their mobile platforms, we feel a greater inspiration may have been drawn from the Google+ social network.

The new News Feed design will be rolled out to users starting today and through the coming weeks. Facebook plans to pilot the new feature with a few users before a full scale roll out. If you are interested in trying out the new News Feed:

1. Head over to Facebook.com and login
2. Navigate to www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed on that same web browser.
3. Scroll down and click on ‘Join Wait List’ and wait to see if you are selected.

If you are one of the lucky few to be selected, you will be able to try out the new Facebook News Feeds feature before your friends or family. If you don’t get selected, don’t worry as the feature will be rolled out to your account in the weeks ahead.

Facebook hopes to start the initial phase of rolling out to the web and iOS devices, followed by Android and other major mobile platforms. The entire rollout process is expected to be completed within a month.

If you have been selected to try out the new Facebook please leave us a comment and share your experience with our readers.