Last night Facebook pushed out the new homepage which we’ve been hearing about over the past few weeks and initial responses are mixed. Some users have called this a improvement, to the news feed whereas developers are not as happy as their feed traffic is down dramatically (some developers have told us they’ve seen a 75 percent decrease in traffic).
What Has Changed
The new Facebook homepage is similar to the previous version but now the default feed only shows highlights. While it now helps users find those stories which are most relevant to them, it also filters through many more. That’s why there’s also a live feed version. In a post yesterday, Raylene Yung outlined the new changes:
After hearing feedback from many of you and exploring some new designs, we decided with today’s changes to move what you used to see in Highlights from the right-hand side to the News Feed view in the main column so you can more easily engage with both views.
We also added information back to News Feed that many of you have asked for, including when your friends have been tagged in photos or have become fans of Pages, in addition to when they RSVP for events or join groups and make new friends. We also made birthdays and events more visible in the right column of the home page.
Users Have Mixed Reviews
Some users are loving the new homepage design as it emphasizes those stories which are most important. As someone who has a large number of friends on the site, I can say that I am actually a huge fan of the new design. However a large percentage of the users we asked on our Facebook Page told us that they preferred the last version of the homepage.
However the vast majority of users were not able to articulate a good reason for going back to the old design. That’s why I would count them among the users who should join the group “I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE“. One possible change by Facebook would be to enable users to select which stream they’d like to view by default: filtered or unfiltered.
For now, users will be forced to accept the filtered version by default.
Developers Hate It
Facebook developers are definitely not happy to say the least. Every developer I’ve spoken to have called this redesign an absolute disaster. The reason is that traffic is down for just about every application on the platform. I’d expect to see decelerated growth across the entire platform as a result of these new changes. This new change illustrates just how dependent developers are on Facebook for continued growth.
We’ll be tracking the impact over the coming days and weeks but this will most definitely reduce the growth of applications across the board. While users may enjoy a less cluttered feed, developers will always have a preference toward unfiltered distribution.
Update
After playing with the news feed for a longer period of time, I realized that once you select the “Live Feed” it will stay there until you switch back to the “News Feed”. That means this overhaul shouldn’t really be something to complain about since you can technically make the live stream your default feed.
What I don’t like is there is no filter on the live news feed. I have lots of FB game friends whose status updates and things were filtered from my old stream. Now I have to hide each of them individually.
thank you for information. i will share it. with my friends.
I’m still not clear on how the News Feed works. From descriptions, it seems like it simply filters through all the activity to only include posts relevant to you (just status updates?).
However, when I go and look at my News Feed, the posts don’t seem to be in chronological order. My current top story is from 15 hours ago, while the next is from 2 hours ago, and so on, randomly mixed together.
Also, I haven’t heard how it filters the posts. Is it some kind of smart process that can tell what kind of posts you would interact with more, or is it simply a set of categories (status updates, apps you interact with, etc)?
HATE IT.
I don’t care that unkown girl X became friends with unknown girl Y. There is no filter, it totally sucks.
I absolutely love it. I love how it actually is exactly as it was before the latest major overhaul… we have a REAL live feed, as it used to be.
I understand that for people who don’t want the whole thing (the live feed), the new news feed might be a little weird. Maybe the default one set by Facebook should be the live feed.
enough changes. stop making them
what we dont like on the new changes:
the automatic filter “add a friend”….when my friend became friend with someone…..or the “became a fan”
we’re not obliged to let them “uncheck” it from their settings….
and the “live feed” and “news feed”..whats the difference? if its the same? why have two? we want the old settings. huhuhuuh
im glad you’re here to help us out express our disappointment.:)
I would put myself in the “i hate it” column, but not without reason. in either view they are now both cluttered with “x is now friends with Y” and “someone is now a fan of Y” etc etc.
These are showing in either views and with no way to remove them without hiding the friend.
These are annoying as they are irrelevant. why should i care is one of my friends connects with someone else? I dont know the other person so its not something i want to see, under the old system i saw this info if i clicked on their wall and that is fine, but to have it show on my page is just reduculas and annoying. The very least they could do is offer options on what posts are shown on the wall. as it is , you have to rely on your friends setting their privacy settings to find that info from you. This is the wrong way around, or rather those options should be available to both the sender (your friend) and the receiver (me).
Also, if the changes are affecting developers, this is a major problem and if they are not careful will turn developers away from facebook and as a result degrade the service.
The problem really is that the difference between the live feed and the highlight feed are also so different that there is no happy medium, you either get all the stuff you want plus all this junk or you miss out on some things and get some of the junk.
I would be quite happy with the new system if i had a way to pick and choose what was displayed and what wasnt.
Oh, so THAT’s what it’s doing. I noticed there I would switch between Live Feed and News Feed but it wasn’t clear to me it was actually switching between Highlights and Complete Feed. They couldn’t just call them Highlights and Complete Feed, that would be too simple.
I’m willing to give it a try but it is taking forever to load, won’t accept my status update or let me upload pictures. I’m all for changes for the better, this one doesn’t seem to be it. Am staying off it for a couple days, too frustrating right now.
I don’t really give a crap who becomes friends with who, rsvps for events, or joins groups. Please remove this shit from News Feed or put it in an irrelevant news feed we can select if we really want to waste our time. This kind of “news” just clutters up my feed and I resent having to read it.
@Nick
You should do a tutorial on setting your default feed to a particular friend list. Choosing who you care about seems much more effective than facebook’s guess in the news feed, and more interesting than the live feed.
I REALLY HATE HOw thiings are going
I Agree Kirsten Stewart lol u a twlight fan or u real GIRL
lol Jayde if u r a fan OXXOOXO LOVE KIRSTEN I NOT GAYY!!
Hey!!! lol You guys have Yoville ???
welllllll i hate how its gooing sloooowowowwwww BBUT I LOVE FACEBOOK!!! Lolllll I ADDICTED !!!!!
I don’t like it because it constant shows whom has friended who, who has become a fan of what in my news feed. It is clunky and cluttered. Also, I cannot always get to my friends video posts immediately, which is why I liked it on the highlights section. Now, if I miss it, I just miss it, unless I feel like scrolling and scrolling.
i can’t even load facebook today. it’s down. lame.
well, i have to say extreeeemely slow. Just too busy to wait for it to load.
i hate how it tells you whos friends with who and what kinds of things your friends are joining. i wish i could turn off those kind of things i dont care who is friends with who
i mean i know you can change it on and off of the live stream but still
I feel like a dolt, but can someone explain this to me:
“Facebook developers are definitely not happy to say the least. Every developer I’ve spoken to have called this redesign an absolute disaster. The reason is that traffic is down for just about every application on the platform.”
For the first time ever, I actually like the FB changes.
I love it.
Except it’d be nice if I could actually use it.
If I try and load up a page, I’ll be lucky to have it load, and that’ll take five minutes.
Commenting/Liking anything? Nope, can’t do that, don’t have permission apparently.
Browsing to friends profiles isn’t working either; I get the same view as if they weren’t my friend - this applies to all of them, they haven’t just locked me out.
And to top it off, I can’t update my status. /cry
It’s (practically) back to the old version — the one that existed before the most recent overhaul (that overhaul that gave us “real time” updates but wasn’t really real time when it eliminated that very useful live feed). I am very excited to see the return of new friend connections, tagged photos, and events. That was the primary way that one could know who and what people were up to in one’s local area. Also, there is some limited return of granular controls — you can edit who to see “more” of in your feed (but not more or less of the content). I’ll take that, even if it’s not exactly as much as the old Facebook. Yay!
overall i really like it. i had really missed seeing tagged pictures show up in the news feed. its how it should have been from the start when they did the last update. i don’t know why it took them over 6 months to fix it though. however facebook haven’t helped themselves. there would have been much less confusion and complaints if they had done 2 things:
1) called the news feed options “highlights” and “live feed” (or “full feed”)
2) had a “customise news feed” link underneath the news feed filters that showed a tickbox list letting you show or hide content types from the news feed e.g.:
- status updates
- new pictures
- picture tags
- new videos
- video tags
- wall posts
- friend additions
- groups
- pages
- notes
- applications i’ve authorised
- other applications (this one would save people like me having to hide each one individually)
I totally hate it. I don’t want FB to decide that because I haven’t commented on a certain person’s status lately that I don’t want to see their status. If I didn’t want to see their status I’d unfriend them or filter them out. You already could filter people out individually so what’s the point of this? I assume this thing now also automatically filters out updates from pages we’ve fanned which 1. makes Facebook almost useless to marketers and 2. makes fanning pages almost useless since it will filter out any news from pages I actually want updates from. (Again if I didn’t want the page’s updates I wouldn’t have fanned it.)
hate it! ditto meredith!
I expect to see them fine-tune the options for filtering content on the news feed, especially since there is so much more content going through it now instead of the sidebar. Once that happens, these changes will really be worth something.
I’m sure I’d be able to adjust to the new changes if they would WORK. I can’t even pinpoint a single problem, because in the past week I’ve seen pages that don’t load, pages that time out, errors saying I need to be logged in, or links that don’t respond. I’m posting here right now because I’ve finally been told the site is down for maintenance and I can’t log in. However, I’m not sure if that’s really the case, or if the site is just misbehaving as it has for some time. My last status update joked that I was tempted to pack up my laptop and go out and get a life.
I hope these things are resolved soon.
It might also be important to add that sometimes my search bar, pokes, and application bookmarks don’t show up. I would report these things, but the Help site doesn’t work for me either.
i am having problems even logging onto facebook - is it down?
i think it would be fine, if they gave us options of what was shown and what wasnt, i think then, we could tailor the feed to our likes and everyone is happy.
I don’tmind the new FB.Just that I can’t find the Home page Filters on the Left side .It is GONE nothing
Use to say:
Newsfeeds
pages
statsus Update
Photos
links
more
WELL I JUST HAVE THE WORD >>>>>> “MORE”.
any help would be appreciated thank you
Carol
IT IS something to complain about! I want the default to be status update not NEWS or LIVE or any other feed. I don’t give a damn who joins what, friends who, plays what, or every other click my friends do. I want to see their status updates - period. The updates are where the discussions take place, and yes, some of us are older than 16 years old, and actually DO have discussions!
This obnoxious change has already chased away several of the folks that I enjoy exchanging with every day. They don’t like it anymore than I do that suddenly their homepage has turned into a dumping ground for Mafia War updates.
I want it to default to Status Update! Is it so hard to give me that damned choice?
Laurel,
“I want it to default to Status Update! Is it so hard to give me that damned choice?”
// You can default to status upates. It’s called http://www.twitter.com
yeah i cant get on at all.. and if i do (by some miracle) it says i have no friends.. which is quite insulting.. one time i got all my friends back started to chat with some one it said error.. i hit ok (kind of expecting it) the page refreshes YAY I HAVE NO FRIENDS AGAIN.. NEW SHIT IS SO LAME..HOW ABOUT U GUYS FUCKING PICK ONE…
My Facebook has been on the fritz since the new updates.. try to log on using a computer says my account is down for maintaince.. past two days.. can’t even use facebook mobile on my iphone… logged on to a friend’s account using my phone.. hers worked fine.. ugh!!! facebook, fail.
Hi, i say all this new facebook junk is a joke, get rid of the applications that yu only do once. get rid of the ones tat are jut at a stand still, get rid of the ones that are old and no one even knows about.
I cant even have my feed for the one application i play (farmville) bc everyone has so much JUNK* on facebook.
Once they allow the colour changing of pages and the auto-play songs on profiles IM DONE!! thats just wayyyy to overboard and goddy.
I loved the facebook with just a wall, photos and.. THAT WAS IT!!
…
I just want my farville tab back on my home page (N)
I’M HATING ALL THE CHANGES EXCEPT THESCURTY CHAGES THEY ARE ALRIGHT. HEY NROMA AND THE REST THAT LIKE THE CHANGES HOW THIS SOUND MEBEERS ONLY UDATE RIGHT NOY AND GET AFACE TBOOK PREMIUM MEBERSHIP AND PAY OLY $14.99 AMONTH.THA’S WHAT IS’COMMING TO YOU LIKE THE SOUND OF THAT? TO THE CANGES I SAY NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
CAROL THEY ARE THERE BUT YOU HAVE TO GOTHROUGH AN ACT OF CONGRESSTO GETN THERE.
CAROL THEY ARE THERE BUT YOU HAVE TO GOTHROUGH AN ACT OF CONGRESSTO GETN THERE.
THEY ARE UNDER NEWS FEEDS NOWJUST CLNEWS FEEDS AN THERE YOU GO.