For those of you that check Facebook every day (read: everyone), expect your life to change a bit in the upcoming days as the company today unveiled its newly designed News Feed feature.
It's been six years since News Feed was introduced and two since it saw any major overhaul. As you know, the web has slightly changed since then. It's become more photo and graphics driven. It's a world driven by strong visuals; visuals that are ceaselessly shared via various social networks like Instagram and, duh, Facebook. Going hand-in-hand with this change is the shift in hardware. Now smartphones, tablets, and some laptops have displays that pack in more pixels than ever before.
Facebook's new News Feed was designed to accommodate all of these changes. So it's larger. It's no longer crammed in the middle of the page when you log in—it's now virtually all you see. Well, that and the ads, of course. This means all those photos your friends upload will be shown in their full high-res glory.
Sharing is different, too. Stories shared by more than one of your friends will be more neatly presented, and content shared from other social networks like Pinterest will be better arranged. The News Feed also now has a drop down menu that allows you to filter posts according to certain categories like "Music," "Photos," "Games," stories from "All Friends," or just ones from your "Close Friends." All of which goes in line with Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the News Feed as a "personalized newspaper" that can bring together the stories you tell privately and the stories you tell publicly.
The new design will begin rolling out today.
