The news that’s spreading like wildfire on online social networks today such as Twitter, Google+ — and yes, Facebook — is the revamping of Facebook’s news feed.
The website announced the addition of the Subscribe feature last week, but close on its heels was the widespread rollout of a redesign to the main interface of the world’s largest social network that reorganizes how users see updates from their friends.
According to a new article on the Facebook Help Center, “All of your news is now in one place with the most interesting stories featured at the top.” The updates your friends post are now separated into several categories and those marked “Top Stories” are promoted to the top of your news feed, while less important and older stories languish further down the page.
What makes a Top Story is determined by your relationship to the person who posted the update and the past interaction between the two, as well as the popularity of the update and whether it was posted since the last time you logged in.
Facebook has removed the “Top News” and “Most Recent” options from the top of the page and says the new display combines both modes into a single news feed.
Along with the changes to the news feed, Facebook launched a new feature called the Ticker which appears to the right of your news feed and shows what your friends are doing in real time. As you browse the site, the Ticker slides along with you and updates to let you know when other friends who are also online post comments, RSVP to events, and so on.
While all the information shown in the Ticker was previously available, depending on each user’s privacy settings, much of it was not displayed in friends’ news feeds, and the updates were not in real time.
Over the last few days, users have also discovered new lists that their users are divided into — even users that had never previously used lists. There are lists based on your networks such as employers and schools and geographic lists which automatically filter in only the updates from people who are also in those networks or areas.
Par for the course, the changes have drawn reaction from both supporters and detractors as well as speculation that the site is copying ideas introduced earlier this year by Google’s infant social networking effort, Google+.
Not so expected were the widespread comparisons to previously dominant (and now considered by many to be on life support) social network — MySpace.
On Twitter, the hashtag #NewFacebook is garnering updates at a rate of about one-per-second, and the keywords “Google+” and “Twitter” are both currently listed on Twitter’s Trends for Denver.
Business and tech blog Mashable.com .
Daniel Schneider: 303-954-2405, dschneider@denverpost.com or on Twitter at
