All Facebook said in the press invite announcing the March 7 event is we’ll “see a new look for News Feed.” But TechCrunch reported in January that Facebook was testing a mobile News Feed that abandoned the traditional blue and white, chrome-heavy Facebook design for a full-screen, image-based approach.
News Feed hasn’t seen a major redesign in ages and definitely needs one. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has called News Feed one of Facebook’s three main pillars, along with Timeline and Graph Search. Graph Search is only a couple months old — many users still don’t have it — and Facebook introduced Timeline in 2011, rolling it out to all profiles in 2012. With those two humming along, it’s time for News Feed to get a complete facelift.
The company took some heat in November when Star Trek star George Takei and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made it clear they’re not at all happy with how News Feed treated posts from Pages. The company addressed the issue by releasing a “Pages only” News Feed that shows all posts from Pages users had liked. Facebook also has continuously revised its News Feed algorithm to highlight posts it considers most relevant to a specific person.
The mobile News Feed currently features a lot of gray, blue and white chrome that takes up far too much space on what little real estate is available on smartphones and mobile devices. It make sense to revamp News Feed so it presents more information by eliminating the chrome and featuring text overlaid atop images. The text-heavy posts could also be displayed atop people’s profile images, adding a more personalized touch to each Facebook post.
Considering Facebook already has implemented features from its standalone apps to its main app, it would be no surprise to see the company divide News Feed between photo and non-photo posts. One of my favorite uses of the Facebook Camera app is scrolling through the image-only feed to quickly see photos friends have uploaded. The new News Feed in the main app could directly port the Facebook Camera feed. It’s also entirely possible, as TechCrunch points out, that Facebook might announce an entirely new standalone News Feed app that shows only the latest news from Facebook in a reader-friendly format.
The desktop version of Facebook’s News Feed also could get a new look. To make more space, the company might start moving ads away from the sidebar and incorporating them directly into the News Feed, as it does on the mobile app. There has also been talk of video ads getting inserted into both the desktop and mobile News Feeds.
No matter what Facebook shows off on March 7, it’s likely to receive at least some user backlash, especially if it features new ad formatting or raises privacy concerns. Oftentimes when the company has released a new or revamped product, like Timeline or when it first launched News Feed in 2006, users have been outraged. Take the Facebook group “I Hate Timeline” that has more than 45,000 likes and the 2006 petition against News Feed that got more than 55,000 signatures.
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