When Marshall Kirkpatrick posted the other day that Facebook could become the largest news reader I had an inkling that it already was. Today, new data released from Hitwise confirms my suspicions: Facebook is indeed the largest news reader. While Yahoo!, Google, and MSN, account for the majority of traffic to news sites, Facebook came in fourth. So why would I suggest that Facebook is the largest news reader even though it’s the fourth largest source of news traffic? Read on to find out.
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As the uproar over the new Facebook design continues, many are getting used to the new features and trying to effectively navigate through the increased number of stories that pop-up on their homepage daily. I’ve been polling users about their feedback on the new design over the past few days and one thing that continuously pops-up is the comments is a desire to filter out application stories.

Currently Facebook lets users view feed stories based on whether they originated. If you’d like to view all of the stories from a single application you can do that. Want to limit stories to all of your friends in a single friend list? You can do that to. There are still some inherent limitations to the new feed but Facebook has taken a huge step forward.
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Since the launch of Facebook’s redesign, users have been filing their complaints about the new layout. Whether it’s problem’s with Facebook’s “real-time” news feed or issues with public profile feed updates not showing up in users’ feeds, we’ve been receiving a ton of feedback. This morning, Dominic Grant brought to our attention an issue with Public Profiles being hid by default. Those public profiles (previously called “pages”) that you subscribed to before the change, may not be showing up in your feed and we’ve found out why.
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Since Facebook released their new design last week, a number of users have been complaining about the prevalence of applications within their news feed and I can understand why. Many feed stories have been showing up from a number of applications which end up publishing multiple stories about a user in a short period of time. The end result is that users will occasionally view their homepage and suddenly there are 5 or more feed stories from the same application.
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Since rolling out the new design last week, many users have noticed that comment box is displayed below feed items by default. It’s a small change but I’ve had a large number of emails and comments related to the topic over the past few days. David Kirkpatrick, author of the book “The Facebook Effect” commented that he believes “it takes up too much space in news feed”.
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In a small addition to Facebook today, the company launched a new feature which turns photo comments into news feed stories. Previously, I believe that photo comments were automatically published to user feeds but now you have the ability to opt-out of that feed story. This is an addition which emphasizes Facebook’s ongoing commitment to user privacy.
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