It’s all over but the complaining: Facebook unveiled a new look for its News Feed Thursday at an event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The new design places greater emphasis on photos and content, and also strives for a consistent look across the Facebook experience on desktop, tablet, and smartphone apps. But as with past changes to the Facebook experience, it’s likely to prompt some whining from users accustomed to the old way of doing things.
Eliza Kern live-blogged the event for us this morning, hosted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several Facebook product executives, and will have more on the new design later today. But here are the highlights:
- Facebook introduced new dedicated feeds that allow you to see just the photos, music, and business pages that you’re following on the service, in addition to being able to follow all of your friends’ updates as usual.
- It also changed the left-hand menu navigation bar, which is also now consistent across devices. It will always be present, as opposed to previous designs where it could be hidden behind the main page.
- Facebook didn’t spend a lot of time talking about ads, rather surprisingly.
- The new design will be rolling out to Facebook’s 1 billion users over the next few weeks, but you can speed up the process by getting on a waiting list here.
Here’s a link to Facebook’s press release on the redesign.
And here’s a before and after comparison provided by Facebook:
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