Facebook’s reveal of its new updated News Feed brings a much needed change to the interface of the social network. Each new iteration to the user interface adds another “necessary” feature to bring more content before your eyes. The previously announced Timeline update in addition to the updated News Feed, changes the interface of Facebook to focus on visual rather than written content.
The example Facebook used was Pinterest, which is focused on curating content with images through different user-created “pin boards.” Facebook is looking to do the same with its classified feeds. You will be able to specify the content that you want to browse, but Facebook is smart to aggregate your information and compile it with your friends’. Facebook mentions that News Feed will display events, which it already does in the feed, but now it sounds like the company will be able to push promoted events in your feed that correspond to the specific category.
Facebook needs ad revenue and they attempt to find different ways to present ads that it considers relevant to you. With the updated News Feed, companies can push gigantic images into your feed. As someone who has a relatively small friends list and content that I follow, when ads display, they usually have nothing to do with any of my actual interests. This happens even more on the mobile app when Facebook “suggests” apps that I may be interested in. Since there is no way to disable ads in the feed on mobile, Facebook may try the same thing in the browser.
How relevant is this to you?
It’s possible that Facebook saw more mobile ad clicks and thinks it can gain the same with a mobile-inspired News Feed for the web. Visually, the updated Timeline and News Feed are great because content is easier to consume, but the other side of the update is that ads could become much more intrusive, especially if you follow a lot of brands on the social network.
