Facebook to retool News Feed
The redesign is said to give users new ways to catch up with what friends are doing.
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is rolling out a radical redesign of News Feed, the biggest since it launched the feature in 2006.
The giant social network plans to unveil the redesign at a news conference Thursday at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
The redesign will reportedly give users new ways to catch up with what friends are doing, such as sorting through photos they share or music they are listening to. Right now users can sort the News Feed only by “Top Stories” or “Most Recent.” The changes address a frequent complaint from users that they have too little control over what appears in their News Feed. The redesigned News Feed will also feature splashier photos and videos.
News Feed is indisputably the most valuable real estate on Facebook. It’s the place that people get updates from their friends. And it’s the place that Face- book is betting advertisers have the best shot at connecting with its 1 billion-plus users.
“News Feed is why we go to Facebook. Anything that makes users more likely to visit is important,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said. “Allowing feed customization provides Facebook with more information about what users find relevant, allowing better targeting for advertisers. Better targeting means higher revenue per impression or click-through, and translates to overall higher revenue and profits for Facebook.”
In an interview at a recent investor conference, Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman said surfacing the most interesting information for users “will be core to our ability to continue to have engaged users even as they contemplate other services.”
But it’s not just about capturing and keeping users’ attention. It’s a major effort to ring up more dollars from advertisers.
“Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos, and we haven’t provided those things historically.… The organic News Feed product that consum- ers use [is] moving toward bigger pictures, richer media, and I think you will continue to see it go in that direction,” Facebook cofounder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in January.
News Feed didn’t start out as the company’s most successful feature.
Facebook debuted News Feed in September 2006, and suddenly everyone could see everything their friends were posting on Facebook. Some 700,000 users out of 9 million joined protests that the new feature that alerted friends to every piece of information they shared on Facebook was too intrusive. They threatened boycotts and clamored for an off switch.
Zuckerberg apologized for the way Facebook introduced the feature and handed users more control over privacy settings but didn’t waver. He promoted the News Feed as a cool way to “know what’s going on in your friends’ lives.”
Facebook on Wednesday announced that Susan Desmond-Hellmann, a Genentech veteran and chancellor of the University of California at San Francisco, was elected to its board.
jessica.guynn@latimes.com