Facebook has updated its website, with a new-look news feed that closely aligns its web and mobile versions under the same design.
Making the announcement at a special launch event in California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the new look for the world’s biggest social network.
The revamp also introduces topic-specific alternatives to its news feed, and ads appear larger.
Facebook reported in January that 1.06 billion people were using its service at least once a month.
It also revealed that its profit for the last three months of 2012 was 79% down on the same period the previous year despite a rise in sales because of increased spending on research and development.
An ad-friendly update?
Enlarging the news feed now allows a sponsored post to become by far the biggest element on the screen, taking up roughly a third of the page when viewed on a 13in (33cm) laptop display.
Another ad-friendly change is that if a user “likes” an organisation a horizontal banner photo is added to posts reporting the news in addition to the brand’s logo, making the update more eye-catching.
In addition, the site will now auto-generate maps to accompany posts about specific locations, in a bid to promote its check-in function which competes with Foursquare- in turn boosting geo-targeted ads.
Andreas Pouros, Chief Operating Officer, Greenlight, said that the challenge Facebook faced was in how it could increase monetisable engagement between users and advertisers whilst maintaining quality in terms of both targeting and also user experience.
“Facebook has taken the success of advertising in peoples’ newsfeeds on mobile and based its News Feed redesign on mirroring that format (or close to it) on all devices – this should boost revenue,” he said.
Pouros also noted back in January that Graph Search, Facebook’s smart search engine which it had just launched, was capable of doing this at the local business level, but pointed out that getting increasingly more from the big brands was the big challenge.
“In the last earnings call Zuckerberg stated Facebook had not seen any evidence that the increased advertising it introduced at that stage had had a negative impact on people”, said Pouros. “The challenge now is to ‘reinvent’ advertising so people don’t feel they are being bombarded by ads. Facebook is now championing ‘high quality advertising’ in an attempt to do that.”
Key changes for users
Facebook has made three key changes to its website.
• The website is now just two columns wide (rather than three) letting the main news feed take up more space. All posts, whether friend updates or ads, will now take up a bigger proportion of the web browser with more prominence given to images and video rather than text describing a link.
• A pop-out black bar is added to the left-hand side of the page. This contains app bookmarks, links to specific friends, the chat and calendar tools, and the live updates ticker.
• Alongside the standard news feed. users can now select other alternative feeds, such as a selected friends, photos and a music-themed feed showing what friends are listening to on Spotify and Rdio.
“With the new design, now Facebook has the same look and feel,” the company said in its official announcement. “For example, the left-hand menu is accessible anywhere you go on Facebook. You also have a way to jump right to the top of News Feed whenever new stories come in.”
Another significant change will see Facebook drop its “facebook” logo with an “f” icon.
The new design will be gradually made available over the coming weeks, with users able to sign up to a waiting list for early access.
Pouros concluded: “Notwithstanding, a small minority of users think that Facebook has gone far enough with ads already (using tools like Facebook Purity to strip them out entirely). Only time will tell if Facebook has. And if it has not, when is it too much? The conflict between user experience and driving more ad dollars looms large. It did with AltaVista historically, who were then unseated in the search engine wars with a new upstart (Google), with a cleaner interface and better user experience.”
Watch a video from Facebook explaining the redesign here:
You can see a preview of the new newsfeed here
Read the official announcement here
