Hoping to tame the blizzard of information that has turned off many users and
discouraged some advertisers, Facebook
on Thursday unveiled a major makeover of the home page that greets users when
they log into the site.
The new design of the Facebook News Feed presents bigger photos and links, including for advertisements, and lets users see specialized streams focused on topics like music and posts by close friends.
The changes are designed to address the company’s two
most vital challenges: how to hold on to users at a time of competing,
specialized social networks and how to draw more advertising dollars to please
Wall Street.
Mark
Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said at a news
conference that he wanted Facebook to be “the best personalized newspaper in the
world.” And like a newspaper editor, he wants the “front page” of Facebook to be
more engaging — in particular on the smaller screens of mobile devices.
The topic-specific News Feeds could well persuade
users to spend more time scrolling through various streams of content. And the
redesign will offer bigger real estate for advertisers, including more
opportunities for brands to feature bigger pictures, which marketers say are
more persuasive than words.
Facebook’s proprietary algorithms, which try to guess
what every user will want to see, will continue to filter the items that show up
on each person’s main News Feed. And users will be able to drill down into
specific topics they are interested in, akin to the sections of a newspaper.
For instance, they can switch over to specialized
feeds that are focused on just the music they are interested in, or they can
scroll through a feed that consists of posts from the pages of products and
people they follow — a bit like Twitter. If they want to see everything that
their friends have posted, they can choose to do that, too; those posts will
rush down in chronological order, without any filtering by Facebook’s robots.
Facebook introduced the new design to some users of
the Web version of its service on Thursday, and will extend it to all Web users
and to mobile apps in coming weeks.
It’s unclear how users will react to the changes; in
the past, major design changes have often been greeted by complaints, at least
initially.
Investors seemed to welcome the new look. Shares of
Facebook rose 4.1 percent on Tuesday, to $28.58. But the company’s stock price
remains substantially lower than its $38 initial public offering price last May.
Facebook is clearly hoping the new format will
encourage users to stay longer on the site. At the news conference to announce
the changes, officials offered examples of content they hoped would be
compelling: photos of a cousin’s babies on one area of the page, Justin
Timberlake concert news on another, a list of stories your friends liked on
National Public Radio on still another.
“The best personalized newspaper should have a broad
diversity of content,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “The most important stuff is going
to be on the front page,” he went on. “Then people have a chance to dig in.”
The announcement met with swift praise from the
advertising industry. In addition to bigger ad formats, the redesign’s
specialized content streams could keep users glued to the site longer, marketers
said.“This will result in more time spent over all on the
Facebook News Feed — and of course, increase engagement with content and ads,”
said Hussein Fazal, chief executive of AdParlor, which buys advertisements on
Facebook on behalf of several brands.
Facebook executives suggested that there would be no
immediate changes to the number of advertisements that appear on the News Feed.
Julie Zhou, the company’s design chief, said only that
ads would be more visual. “Everything across the board is going to get this
richer, more immersive design,” Ms. Zhou said.
The redesign is also a nod to the ubiquity of mobile
devices, which a majority of Facebook’s one billion users worldwide use to log
into their accounts. Pictures will show up bigger in the News Feed. And there
will be larger images of maps and links to articles. In that way, the new look
is a nod to other social networks that are seeing viral growth, like Pinterest,
which is built around large pictures.
The new News Feed emphasizes the importance of
photographs, which are one of Facebook’s most underexploited assets. Mr.
Zuckerberg said that half of all News Feed posts are pictures, compared with
about a quarter of all posts a year ago. Every day, 350 million pictures are
uploaded to Facebook by individual users and brands.
The new design is virtually identical on the desktop
and on tablets and cellphones.
Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird, said
that the changes were positive for the company. “We see this as more likely
enhancing the longer-term value of Facebook for both users and advertisers
rather than adding materially to financial performance in the very near term,”
he said.
Users weighed in on Twitter.
“Not sure if @facebook is merchandising our attention
or Zuckerberg cares about our reading habits,” Daixin Neill-Quan, a
self-described Boston University senior, posted after the news.
Others pointed out that Flipboard, a popular app,
already offers a personalized newspaper in which users choose the topics and
publications they are interested in.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, chairman of the media studies
department at the University of Virginia, said the redesign could help educate
users as to just how much Facebook’s algorithms filter what they see on what
they think of as their social network.
“Users will at least be under less of an illusion that
what’s happening on Facebook is merely a function of what their friends are
doing,” he said. “Facebook is the puppet master of our social network.”
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