Facebook has once again made changes to users’ news feeds. As of today, the interface will reflect a “real-time ticker”, larger photos in the stream, and will replace the “Most Recent” and “Top Stories” links with a smarter news feed for users to receive the most important information.
The news ticker now appears in the top right-hand side of the home page, above the chat section. This new feature shows real-time updates from a user’s social graph, rather than sharing information that has taken place in the past, like the main news feed does. Upon clicking on an item in this ticker, a hover window will appear that allows users to interact with that content instantly.
Additionally, as photos are one of the most popular forms of content within Facebook, these will become more prominent in the news feed. Once any photos are uploaded by users, they will appear much larger than they have previously, taking up more real estate and offering users a more visually appealing stream of information.
Lastly, and arguably the biggest change, is the removal of the “Most Recent” and “Top Stories” links that organized users’ news feeds. With these two links removed, all information is presented in one stream; the posts that appear are based on when a user last logged into Facebook. So, regardless of how old or new the content is, this smarter feed will adjust the content and pull out what it deems the most important updates since the last login.
When Facebook sees content that it believes is top news, users will see a blue triangle in the top-left corner of the post. From here, users will have the ability to mark or unmark it as a “Top Story”. For more frequent Facebook users, all recent updates in the news feed will be organized in chronological order.
With Facebook rolling out these new changes to its interface, the ultimate goal is to provide users with even more relevant information and an overall better user experience. However, with only a few short days until its f8 conference, even bigger changes may be upon the horizon for this social media powerhouse.
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