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Facebook's New Feed

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247 pointsmikeevans191 comments

Looks awfully similar to the G+ feed. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just that its confirmation that G+ was probably heading in the right direction.

The bigger (no pun intended) news here is the much bigger ads that are now in the news feed.

I agree, my initial thoughts were that it reminded me of G+.

I personally love the G+ feed, the issue was lack of content to fill it. I was starting to get pretty tired of looking at the same old cluttered feed on facebook. I always felt that the feed column was surprisingly thin, and that the left column took up a lot of real estate for something I interacted with so rarely.

I think this will be a refreshing change for Facebook.

G+, Android, and the Note II. A beautiful combination. Unfortunately, nobody I know uses G+ so I don't check much.

Look for some Communities in your field of interest. That way, G+ has become a great place to discover interesting content, at least for me.

I think G+ should start relying more on content, as the network effect is not working out. Something like what Quora has done. If they manage to get people using G+ somehow, the chances of network effect kicking off will be higher. Right now, they gotta think of doing something else.

I'd suggest they build a system for displaying events that allows people without G+ to use it.

It seems counter intuitive, but hear me out: 1) FB events is good bc everyone is on fb, but its bad bc you never know what will be shared. It also is bad because the few people who aren't on facebook can't get the invite.

2) Google+ events is slick, really slick.

3) As a person with G+ I recently created an event and invited my friends knowing that it wouldn't be autoshared with people I don't want invited. The problem was that about 40% of my friends don't use G+.

Since people making events are the people who have most of the social power, it benefits google to cater to them. The way to do it is by allowing them to invite people to RSVP for events even if they are not google plus members.

Eventually people we see it as another reason to use google+. If you have events on there, you will go on there and probably post other stuff.

People with high social value will push the needle much, much faster.

You can invite non-G+ users to G+ events, I am not sure how smooth that experience for them though.

It seems like they have to create an account. I just think they could definitely grab a user base that way. It wouldn't be the panacea, but they should be attacking parts of facebook now, not the whole thing.

They seem to be working on it: http://www.google.com/patents/US20120079023

For example my community for and about Internet Startups or the Hacker News one.

Internet Startups: https://plus.google.com/communities/100445483815501942968

Hacker News: https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266

Try adding the Hacker News circle, and then just filter people out as they post stupid stuff. It's a great "in" to find interesting people/content.

> Unfortunately, nobody I know uses G+ so I don't check much.

I'm lucky enough to know quite some people on G+ and I circled quite a group of interesting users. But until they finally implement a public API I wont use it full time. I wonder what is taking them so long.

Google Groups doesn't even have a decent API.

It's called email :-)

personally it doesn't reminds me of G+. It reminds me of Tumblr actually.....

Agreed. This looks very much like Tumblr's dashboard, only with G+'s color palette.

This, no doubt, is a very deliberate decision -- especially after the flurry of articles recently about teens dropping out -- but I still feel it completely misses the reason why people are flocking to Tumblr in the first place. I don't know how they managed to do it, but Karp and the rest of the Tumblr team have fostered a culture there that just makes Facebook look corporateish and slightly dull in comparison. I can't put my finger on exactly _why_ it feels so, but there's definitely something going on there.

Maybe the thought is that if they change the design to resemble what teens are using, those teens might accidentally use FB without noticing.

> I don't know how they managed to do it, but Karp and the rest of the Tumblr team have fostered a culture there that just makes Facebook look corporateish and slightly dull in comparison

Or maybe, people simply don't like being figuratively shat on and decided to find something new as soon as it presented it self.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing tumblr here, it certainly played its role well, I'm just saying that people have wanted out of facebook for a long time and a lot of their user base is just waiting for something new that has enough of their friends to move to.

Facebook made it big with the wall feature, the newsfeed scrolling down your page with your mousewheel showing you all the content and happenings of your friends. When facebook starts to mess with the wall by:

- hiding things (and charge to make them more visible, specifically after promising never to do so)

- adding ads

- filling it with game updates,

- businesses "like this 4000 times and win a prize" contests

- X liked on page A, so here maybe you'll like this page B

Is it really no wonder that people get fed up, bored, and start looking for something with the original feature that drove them to facebook in the first place. And don't even get me started on all the other problems re privacy, naming policy, and silent settings resets.

The reasons people are leaving are obvious to me.

All I can really say is: tumblr, I hope you're ready.

that and... where can I buy some tumblr stock?

It's what I call the Karp/Poole identity (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/20/chris-poo...) versus the "Zuck" identity (tied to legal name):

> “What’s at stake is the ability to be creative and expressive on the Internet,” says Poole. “I especially worry about young people. Part of growing up is finding who you are, what you’re passionate about, what you’re interested in, and being an idiot, making mistakes. And now that we have a persistent, consolidated identity online — look at Timeline, that’s what it is — I fear that we’ve lost the ability for the youth to explore themselves and make these youthful indiscretions.”

Even when Karp is asked about FB (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/06/david-karp-on...) the one thing he mentions is it's tying to the Zuck identity:

> Consider the undertaking of taking the internet [in which] anonymity was so inherent… and Facebook [bringing] some sense of true identity to the internet and to the world -- what an impossible undertaking that they did an incredible job with, and still do.

The real battle here is between person and persona. I shall place all my chips in the second basket.

I had the exact same thought. This looks nothing like G+.

This was my first thought as well...though its been 3 years since I actually signed into Facebook...I get the same experience though email:

"You you know (some random person) and (some other random person)?" -- NO

The difference is that Google Plus looks absolutely terrible. I'm not kidding - load it up now - and look at the incredible amount of clutter around the content. The new Facebook News Feed is about highlighting content (and no doubt, ads), the G+ homepage is full of junk.

Don't get me wrong, I can see where there could be some inspiration taken, but the News Feed looks like G+ done right.

The G+ app, on the other hand, is great. No complaints there.

This isn't surprising, when G+ launched all the comments were about how remarkably similar it looked to Facebook.

Is anyone else getting really, really bored of the term "beautiful" being bandied around so much in this type of context? It has long ceased to mean anything at all.

I understand the importance of aesthetics in design, but it seems odd to show off the design under the banner "bright, beautiful stories" - surely that depends on the stories?

It's also a bit meaningless since no one ever wants to describe the thing they just designed as not being "beautiful".

Beautiful, amazing, and "super" are the three most overused and annoying words that the young hipster tech community uses.

gorgeous is becoming pretty common too

Gorgeous!

that was an amazing observation!

to note carefully some data here, joonix said in his last post on HN: "G+, Android, and the Note II. A beautiful combination. Unfortunately, nobody I know uses G+ so I don't check much."

I never said I wasn't part of the community ;)

"Magical" and "revolutionary" if you're Steve Jobs or Phil Schiller.

Or Will Wright

"Rich"

Surely "Awesome" must take the top-spot

"hipster" is the most overused and annoying word that the "complaining about things on the internet" community uses.

That's a really "crass" statement.

As a side note, what I liked about Steve Jobs is that he almost never used over-the-top adjectives to describe the products he was demonstrating. Rather, he used words like "cool" and "neat." This made him sound a lot more credible and convincing.

That's interesting - it's actually Steve Jobs to whom I attribute this trend.

I'm not really an Apple guy, though, so it may be a misperception on my part.

I'm not sure how true that is, given that every Apple product is billed as "The best foo yet."

I don't think the word "best" has the same flair as "beautiful" or "gorgeous." It's actually a very simple word that conveys a very specific meaning. It's strong and perhaps even cocky, but I wouldn't say it's hipsterish or over-the-top.

He started using the word "magical" in some of the ads & announcements if I recall correctly.

That was used to describe the iPad. I'd argue it was a magical device relative to what was on the market at the time.

The couple keynotes I've watched Steve Jobs used more superlatives than I thought necessary. And he used them over and over again.

You're remembering wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA#t=16s

That was funny!

Others have pointed out that he could be very superlative, so I'll just say that when he used words like "cool" or "neat," he was super-credible.

My favourite over-the-top Jobs-ism was "Insanely Great." "Wicked Fast" comes in second. He may have overused these terms, but some of Apple's products hit the mark. I really think the Macintosh SE and first iPhone ware insanely great products.

I agree but why take particular issue with this bit of marketing speak? Wouldn't you say that almost all self-deployed marketing adjectives are disposable?

"Delightful" is the trend word I'm waiting to die

You don't want a ~beautiful, hand-crafted, pixel-perfect experience built with love~?

I am! Truth and beauty are universal ideals. Overfixating on beauty may weigh against a simple but honest design

although, it's Facebook stories so how else can they improve them other than beautifying them? There is no other way to make the 19999th picture of your cat remain interesting.

They always try to make it interesting by making it sound like it's about stories and people and stuff. When really it's about cats and food and silly quotes of not so famous people.

Depends how selective you are with your friends list.

And repostings of smug political memes, and repostings of trite pop-culture mash-ups, and repostings of alarmist linkbait... And then a welcome anecdote from a family member that brings a smile to your face just as you were considering deleting your account for the fiftieth time.

Well, that depends on your friendlist. Most of the stuff on my "feed" are news articles and blog posts, there's almost nothing about cats and rarely food related posts.

That sounds like you turned your Facebook wall into a Twitter/LinkedIn/G+ feed. Kudos! :)

The big lie is right up top: "All about your friends."

If you look at the layout, it de-prioritizes who is posting as a sidebar avatar (or multiples, in the case of reshares). The left gutter of the feed then becomes a morass of icons and avatars, with the inevitable descent into noise as the calendar icons and companies like CNN proliferate. I wouldn't be surprised if companies start redesigning their FB icons to look more "friend"-ly.

The redesign also copies a problematic design feature of the last revamp of Twitter where the resharer (retweeter) is grayed at the top of the post, minimizing its relationship to the content compared to "Foo shared a link," "Bar is going to Event Name." Curiously, this attributory distinction is more apparent in the mobile view.

So, at the end of the day, as content gets visually divorced from the people associated with it, it makes it easier for FB to slip more and more paid content into feeds.

P.S. "Join Waiting List" ...I'd be fascinated to learn how they use the waiting list and graph traversal to structure the rollout. You know they're going to try to maximize something like that.

Mine was all people reposting spam.

Share this and get an xBOX 720!!!!

I'm giving away 10M to whoever shares this!!!!

SHARE THIS AND GET A PLAYSTATION 5!!!!!

I got to the point where my feed was empty; almost every user was hidden.

This seems like the new spam fad of the month, if anyone bothered to check the pages posting them they would see it isn't Sony or similar rather a page made a week ago.

Who are you friending that is reposting spam?

That's the real WTF

'Veneer tactics' are quite commonly employed by startups:

- YouTube talked about being primarily a site for sharing homemade videos, when its true backbone for growth was illegal music uploads - Buzzfeed talk about how they are taking media to the next level, when it's really one longform article surrounded by cat pictures and dog videos - Tumblr always make sure to dodge the fact that porn is one of the biggest reasons for their growth

it's simply putting your best foot forward. Very natural and understandable.

The most interesting line of the press conference: "We're going to try something new. We're going to put the news items in chronological order."

I thought the same thing. Isn't that what they SHOULD have been doing all along? I know they had the drop-down to switch from "most recent" and "top stories", but I was interested by that also. I wonder if they meant something more "grey".

Whether they should have been doing it depends on how you use Facebook, I think. I tend to log into it once a day or so, so a non-chronological view actually suits me great. It'll be a shame if it goes away.

Whether chronological makes sense is a product of the number of times you log in and the number of 'friends' you have (and the number of posts they make).

I have 140 friends. I log in a couple of times a day. I have filtered all their crap. I want chronological order.

If I had 1000 'friends' who posted all day, then I would want a way more filtered and special-sauced feed.

This is great news. Along with a feed that shows you EVERYTHING the people you follow post.

And Groups and Pages!

So they are taking back the change that required pages to pay if they wanted their posts to show up?

It always drove me nuts that I had to repeatedly set my news feed BACK to 'Most Recent'.

Maybe the fact is that most people were constantly having to set their feed to "Most Recent," and there was little takeup on their special sauce sorting. If the special sauce sorting dies silently I doubt anybody except the implementors will miss it.

... and everyone that uses it and has no idea to click on the tiny 15x150px area that exists to change it.

Something new? Hopefully that was said with a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge, as that's the way it used to work and the "top stories" algorithm (and the way it keeps being set as the default despite me setting "most recent" every few days) has been infuriating.

I found the references to "personalized newspaper" most interesting.

Using the newspaper comparison, I imagine a front page with a promoted gizmodo story surrounded by ads for things facebook thinks I care about with a whole bunch of quick meme images "below the fold" liked by people I know.

Maybe if I flip through the eternal september fluff that floats to the top of the personalized newspaper long enough I just might see a relevant post from a friend with a low edge rank about how her daughter's cancer responded positively to treatment and is now considered in complete remission.

I wonder if Layervault is going to file a DMCA against Facebook too.

http://i.imgur.com/h07jo3d.png

Haha, that's great.

As a teacher, I'm somewhat sad that text will be less important, but I can't say that I blame Facebook for emphasizing images over words. While it might be nice to tell 7th graders that they should be able to write because the internet is based on text, it's always been true that any day that might change. And it isn't like writing skills will be less important, just harder to explain to insular children of the middle class.

Does somebody have a tl;dr of this statement?

Or, even better, a pictorial representation?

For some reason, a teacher thinks that this will damage Facebook's reputation as a bastion of great intellect and writing.

Looks great with professionally shot, high res photos. Most of the photos that will be shared out in the wild won't look nearly this good in the new layout. Same thing happened with the Cover Photo.

Yup. We always have to talk our designers down because they use 9000x14000 pictures when designing layouts - the true test of a layout is whether it survives a crappy blown-up cellphone picture in that slot.

So true, but hopefully, as phones -- which are replacing digital cameras for many people -- up their resolution, such designs will look better for people with a broader range of mobile devices!

I don't like this trend towards icons without labels. They make things prettier but don't increase functionality.

I deleted some mails on my phone the other day because there was a new flat icon and I was curious what it did. Turns out it deleted the currently selected emails.

What is it that facebook employess work on daily? I see release of new features fairly often for something like G+ but rarely see anything from FB short of redoing what they've already done. Is this accurate or am I just unaware of a release blog?

You can follow the facebook engineering page to see updates on what engineers get up to https://www.facebook.com/Engineering

Their news page gives a good sense of the major new features: http://newsroom.fb.com/News

In general, I don't think they announce minor new features at all, they just deploy them slowly.

That would make sense but I wonder why. It is the minor updates that might be more interesting than "we've redone X".

Two reasons I can think of: Facebook does incremental rollouts, so they don't want to announce features that everyone doesn't have, plus Facebook users are extremely hostile to change (that they know about) so providing a list of changes is counter productive.

That might be true but I do recall that last "cover" update was announced to all but rolled out incrementally as well. The mentality issue might be the true root cause but perhaps if they did more announcements people might get more used to the idea of things changing.

Don't know where you got that idea from. For Facebook's size I think they move incredibly quickly. Also "short of redoing what they've already done" is actually the kind of crappy thinking that leads to a feature-bloated, never-launched, generally-crappy product.

I am interested to know what makes you believe they move quickly. Do you follow an internal blog or know engineers? From the items the two other people posted it does seem that they post quite a bit but most of it seems to be about how facebook works internally or items their employees are doing for other people (AMAs).

I'm not sure I agree with your second statement in this context but I do agree with it generally in the sense that it is harmful. Obviously if one never releases a product but runs through the rolling internal releases of redoing items they've already done, then that can lead to an terrible negative-feedback loop. For a company that is well-established, however, I'm not sure the same rules apply. You don't maintain success by iterating on your existing product offering and instead need to rely on either simplifying, speeding up or offering new products/features to your clients.

One could argue that they are attempting to find alternative revenue source in these rewrites, which would be a valid argument and one I could understand, unfortunately I am not able to either confirm or quell that suggestion.

I applaud this. Also want to point out that facebook and google are converging -- google is integrating more social into its search (http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho...), facebook integrating more search into its social (https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch)

I'm glad we are doing something different, because these juggernauts are about to collide and the ripples will be felt everywhere.

Great. It isn't Schadenfreude exactly, but I hope big changes ups (that they have to make because doing nothing is not an option) like this accelerate their decline.

I don't think Facebook will go away any time soon but it will become another Yahoo and that can only be a good thing for the ecosystem in terms of opportunities.

Except this is a good change, from what I can see. I think it really does make the site nicer to look at. Why would improving the site accelerate their decline?

Change. Users hate change, period. Unless you were psychic and managed to change it in exactly and only the ways they were thinking of.

Meh, people will complain, and then they will get over it, just like every other iteration of Facebook so far.

No one uses G+. I'm relatively technical, and have 40-odd friends there, and the last post was from December 2012 (and the one before that? July!).

The problem with Google and social networking is that social networks initially catch on by being 'cool'. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pintrest - they were all initially cool, and got that market right. G+ has never been cool (nor, in my opinion, is Path). If an app is used by a small group of people because it's cool, then it will grow. If it's used by a group of techies because it's better, it will grow until (at most), it covers the entire subset of techies. G+ isn't going anywhere, at least until there's a major rebrand.

Ah. Well sure, people complain about big changes, every time they happen, mostly because they don't like having to relearn things.

When FB introduced the newsfeed, people thought it was supremely creepy and they complained. Now they probably don't remember what it was like without it. When the timeline was introduced, it was the same thing. People complained about business accounts, apps, searching, photo tagging...every major change gets loads of complaints. And yet most people accept or even love those things within a couple months, and FB has continued to grow monumentally.

I see no reason to imagine this visual redesign or even the upcoming graph search will be any different.

Facebook have gone through loads of UI shakeups, and loads of people complain each time, and they're still here.

> Goodbye Clutter. Hello bright, beautiful stories.

Unless you consider inline advertisements disguised as posts from your friends as "clutter", because uh, there will be way more of those.

"Great news guys! Bigger pictures!"

translation

"Great news advertisers! Bigger ads!"

Pretty much. Whenever I use it on my iPad that's probably 70% of the screen real estate now when I open up the app.

Also, bigger pictures…

If you have been following facebook as a developer, you will know that these changes affect the visibility of apps and third parties profoundly. It's not discussed alot, but these changes are circular over the years; there has been barely any innovation since the introduction of the newsfeed. This new sorting they've been working on is the default from a few years back, and the aesthetic is obviously a copy of G+.

Facebook may be considered a successful company, but the truth is that its leaders seem to lack in vision and have the tendency to make the same mistakes expecting different results. Zuck had some great intuitions (quick and aggressive growth, treating all users as wannabe attention whores), but the design of the product is circling around itself since 2009 at least. Their platform became a huge success when Dave Morin was in charge, yet ever since, despite the fact that it has been refactored a gazillion times, nothing substantial has been added to it. As a developer of apps that benefit from exposure to facebook, i brace myself for the forthcoming semantic changes in their platform that is most likely to follow.

I have an honest question.

Does it give them tactical advantage to redesign their site every year? Not that I'm against redesigns, in fact I think that they're getting better and better, but I'm curious whether they do this for the users or for their own sake.

One hypothesis would be to prevent ad-blindness. If you visit the same layout day after day, after a while your mind learns to subconsciously detaches adverts from the content, it will be like it doesn't even exist. New layout, the learning process has to start all over again.

As much as people hate change I think they also hate stagnation.

Oh cool. A Google+ skin for Facebook?

I can see the Photos feed being an interesting Instagram like view of the Facebook feed assuming it only includes photos uploaded by friends and not all links to photos shared by friends (e.g. quick memes).

This is probably my favorite redesign from a major company so far. Very minimalistic and clean.

Also can't help but visualize how Instagram will come into play, with such a heavy emphasis on photos in this new update.

Minimalism doesn't involve hiding features, text, and navigation items away where they're hard to find. Minimalism is about finding new ways to make things simpler, not to hide things that were already there in the first place, arguably reducing usability.

See The C Programming Langauge for true minimalism.

> Bursting With Color

Facebook know my locale is UK English, not US English.

A small niggle I know but these things annoy me!

And if they didn't already know, your use of the collective plural "Facebook know" instead of the more American-sounding "Facebook knows" should tip them off.

Niggle is the true shibboleth. That word is illegal in America now.

Glad they finally got rid of Lucida. The typeface sucked with Facebook's aesthetic; Helvetica Neue seems to be far more conducive to the new layout.

Agreed!

The use of Lucida made the site feel very dated to the mid 00's, and it wasn't terribly readable either.

Helvetica, especially with full-usage of the font-weights (from light to bold) makes for a much better typographical hierarchy and a more airy feel.

Glad also to see that they're moving to a no-borders design and really filling up the browser window.

Announced in a YouTube video. I love it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaQQHYQHnMk

Another video, more focused on actually running through the specific changes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PW54Sm99ck

I'm wondering if I could be more influential with the words I write on Facebook by posting pictures of sentences in a stylized manner.

yes, if reddit is anything to go on.

Absolutely. Pictures have a much higher base edgerank. That's why you see a lot of companies uploading a picture with their promotion, or saving it as an image.

Source: http://m.techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/ (see edge types)

Oh god FB is actively promoting this shit? (I guess it tracks user behavior, but still...)

lots of nice UX improvements, but right now somehow reminds me of Google+

I think it's commendable every time Facebook has pushed through a major re-design like this. They have a about the largest group of change-averse users of any site. Countdown to all of the complaining and petitions that will happen once people learn that their cheese is about to be moved.

The being wanting to hold on to the current design will be the same people that hated the current design when it was released.

Finally. I was wondering if FB will even get rid of its cluttered design. It took them so long... I like mobile first approach and clean user interface.

Looking on these screen shots http://newsroom.fb.com/ImageLibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetails... still can't get why some huge images overboard the main column (looks like they have negative left and right margins) on iPad and mobile while other pictures/videos have margins? It was already the case on iPhone, but on iPad in the two columns view it looks worst.

If anyone from FB is here: is the live news ticker going away? I can't see it in any of the new design preview pictures. I honestly love that feature and would hate it to go away in the new design.

> Inspired by mobile

Interesting move to adopt a mobile UI to desktop users. I agree having a cross-platform uniform experience makes sense but like YouTube, their left sidebar feels out of place on desktop.

They are actually coming into line with the internet in 2013. Universal experience across all platforms? Awesome. New, clearer less cluttered interface? Awesome.

I also think the killer feature is the ability to clearly filter your news feed by pictures, updates, people you follow etc. Fot instance, I DO want to be able to follow some celebrities and tv shows on facebook without them cluttering up my newsfeed too much. Now all I have to do is select my following list and I'm there. Ditto for friends + photos etc.

Facebook will end up being a photo sharing site.

Facebook IS the biggest photo sharing site.

End up? That's basically where they started. The popularity of Facebook in its very early days was because they made it easy to "stalk" your friends (and/or crushes) via the photos that they shared.

If Facebook hadn't made photographic integration so central to their platform, I don't think they'd have taken off the way they did.

That's also why they were so scared of Instagram - they knew how powerful a network of photo sharing can be.

can someone post some screenshots on imgur please? No access at work =/

http://i.imgur.com/mp2QNad.png

Just 2 pics though.

soo G+? is this live now? or not yet?

They are gradually rolling it out on the web to users over the next month. Then iOS, then Android.

Stupid question: What browser are they using in those screenshots? It doesn't look like Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

it looks like it's on an iPad default browser

Here's a full capture. Large image ahead.

http://i.imgur.com/QbawFLb.jpg

It looks so pretty. Oddly reminiscent of G+

+1 for the redesign

+1 for the +1 pun

The redesign really feels like it really will translate well to mobile, as in the Facebook Phone. Instead of a grid of apps, you have a strip of categories of information (feeds, events, notes, chat) followed by your favorite apps. Then instead of a separate speed dial screen you have those user icons below that.

Apparently has caught on to the fact that most people nowadays don't like to read. sigh

A photo is worth a thousand words. Cameras are ubiquitous, mobile bandwidth can support it, and it's generally more visually enjoyable.

The design of the intro page is interesting to me. There's a strong attempt to avoid the "boxes in boxes" look that, unfortunately, facebook itself still has. But on the intro page, the only frame is the the browser window itself.

Is Facebook actually featuring Twitter's Vine on their New Feed video? http://youtu.be/YaQQHYQHnMk?t=37s

Also, I like it better, more content / less chrome.

The Follow news feed filter was much needed.

I'm not even on Facebook, and barely knew what timeline looked like, but having just read this I'm impressed... in part because it looks so damn close to work I've got in progress for forums :(

Is there a way to block the ads on Facebook using say Adblock etc.?

Yes. Use Adblock.

How does it detect sponsored stories?

Any thoughts on how this will affect FB connect stories (positively or negatively).

I love Graph search, it has helped tremendously pin down who are users are without using FQL or our DB.

Overall I'm impressed.

These new Facebook UI updates proves that... .nws_feedContent{-moz-border-radius: 3px;-webkit-border-radius:3px;border-radius:3px;}

can go a looong way to improve design.

No examples of how regular status updates look like...

Designing Facebook is like putting makeup on a pig.

The pay's better at FB, however.

It looks like an improvement to me. I joined the wait list. Hopefully there are not to many "I like the old design better" groups.

It's actually pretty slick. I like the small picture icons on the left of each content pane as the content scrolling by.

That video makes it seem like they cured cancer or something. But no.. they uncluttered the news feed!!

Is this really such a big deal?

What is that browser in the intro page? Are they just trying to be neutral or...? I find it really distracting.

You mean all the crap I don't care about is now organized into categories of crap I don't care about?

Why do you even use Facebook?

It's tumblrbook. I always preferred tumblr's aesthetic over FB and G+, so this is a welcome change.

Is it just me or does the side bar look a lot like the Ubuntu's Unity Interface sidebar?.

It does, and the first thing I thought was: This person is trying out the new Facebook design on a Ubuntu machine, yay!

The most striking thing about this is its unapologetic rip-off of Apple's product tours.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Neither apologize.

I am neither, so I cite sources and add acknowledgments. And apologies. (Sorry to go off topic.)

> Join the waiting list Sounds like building fake hype to me...

It's sad that this will be cluttered with sponsored stories.

Good bye clutter... hello new room for more ads

Another waiting list ? This is really annoying.

How do you get it before everyone else?

work at Facebook.

tumblr did it first, and did it better.

if there is a view to just see the pages that you follow, this will keep brands happy. Otherwise - yawn!

They did announce such a view, and it should make brands, as well is some users, happy. I follow w00t, but only see the actual sales they post once in a while, now I can see the daily deals daily.

It looks like a Wordpress.com Reader.

Looks like Google+. Obviously obvious. Difference being, very few people actually use Google+ Though I do not use Facebook actively, but I still have my account and do check it a few days so the new/cleaner look is certainly a welcome break.

Now, it depends upon what Facebook "pushes down the throat of this new feed". If it's all the same but larger ads, spam posts or those app posts then nothing changed and if it did, it changed for bad.

I am never going to get tired of being called no one.

Ding ding ding! The only comment, as far as I can tell, hitting the nail on the head. For ALL the moaning about Facebook's ad revenue, I can't believe it's not being parroted more.

I recently posted a status on Facebook, were most of my audience is tech-ish people, and got an overwhelmingly affirmative response to the supposition that the News Feed is increasingly spammy. I don't blame FB. I don't want to be that guy bitching needlessly, but it's becoming a nuisance. Especially when I get way more relevant information through G+ and Twitter. Frankly, FB is becoming more and more about the Pages I like (which arguably, to some, is already nearly spam) and random pages that FB is super desperate for me to like. "Mediaite" anyone?

Yes. Facebook is a business model where the money comes from legally violating users' privacy which the users served into their platter with full consent. I never ever blame them - though I don't like it.

Can't speak of the new interface, my account still hasn't got it. Hardly matters. Because now I only check Facebook two a friend's contact details or message a friend for whom the only medium communication has reduced to Facebook chat/messages. Or maybe once in a while to make some smart-ass status update :-)

Liking pages is inviting spam. I've stopped doing that. I keep my minimal contact over there. With cell phone, email hidden from outside world and make a point to check the settings time to time. I do not share photos over there any more. I usually do it via Dropbox or just email it, if it's a few pics(Google sees it then :P).

Google+ is a lot lot more cleaner and easier but unfortunately there's no one else. I mean for me there's hardly 2-3 guys who share it and I am not switching friends or making new ones to use Google+.

Mediaite is a portal I see. I apologise but I couldn't get the context or maybe the joke was lost on me if there was one :P (non USA guy here).

Can't critique HN for it, kudos, but the problem is people are lazy and don't want to read. Tumblr is just another photo sharing platform, IMO. Facebook and G+ are running over each other to show display ads.

The fixation on better display ads is constraining creativity when everyone should be focusing on making the Internet a productive place for individuals.

The economics matter and shape the UX and server side development.

This is ridiculous. Currently FB limits your feed photos to 400px (horizontal and vertical).

It looks like they are increasing it to 550px.

This, literally, makes no sense. Current monitors can easily support 1000px horizontal, and, as a photographer, I wouldn't consider that quality.

Both FB and G+ suck as photo galleries. I want to see large beautiful photos, not 550px thumbnails.

Yesterday (or was it the day before?) I found out that you can use the mouse wheel to enlargen photos on G+.

I just tried it. Mouse wheel just scrolls the page up and down.

It's Ctrl + Mouse wheel

That's using your browser then no?

That's just the browser zoom. It doesn't increase the quality of the photos.

This is a demo of what it looks like for me:

http://imgur.com/a/Mja3r

Dunno what to tell you. :/ It does need mouse focus, but I imagine you tried that. I did not need to use Ctrl.

I was talking about the feed, not the closeup gallery view.

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