Stop it. Just stop it! You haven't even tried it yet.
How can you already be complaining about the new news feed? Stop shouting. Seriously. Can you even hear me over all the noise? Over the collective moaning and griping and typing and prattling on about how Facebook just blew it -- again.
Just hold on. Because it actually looks really good.
No. No I am not kidding, all right?
The first significant overhaul of Facebook's news feed since it debuted has a serious emphasis on images and visual content and will be broken up into separate feeds, distinguished by content type. So no more wedding photos interspersed with a diaper promo since you Liked the Pampers page.
Announcing the redesign, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his team wanted to "give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can give them." In this case, that means "socially and locally relevant updates" that have to be "visual, rich and engaging." This is why everything in your news feed is about to get BIGGER.
Zuckerberg pointed to some charts showing that 50% of stories in users' news feeds include photos, a number which has been rising for several years. The shift to a more visually oriented news feed then is aimed to at reflecting the type of content most of us are encountering there. You might also be aware Facebook owns Instagram. So there's that, too.
Here are the three most significant changes coming your way:
1. There will now be multiple categories of feeds for different types of content, all accessed from a new navigation box in the upper right. This means separate, dedicated news feeds for photos, music, friends, close friends, games and any pages you follow. The aim is a news feed with less clutter. That’s actually Facebook's big in-house slogan guiding the redesign.
Each feed will be sorted chronologically, which is a shift, and the list of your available feeds will be organized based on which you access most often. Because Facebook is always watching. Always. Watching.
2. Two words: picture pages. Bill Cosby's favorite educational tool also perfectly describes what we're all about to encounter on Facebook. A major emphasis on photos and visual content will be impossible to miss. Not only will photos be a lot larger and album previews include more images up front, but non-photo content is also getting more visual.
Preview images next to articles? Bigger. Profile pics attached to a friend's activity? Bigger. Video previews? Bigger. That list of friends who liked an article or photo on your feed? Not a list anymore; profile pics instead.
Words, sentences and spelling? Irrelevant. Mor pikchurzzz!!!
3. One design, three platforms. For the first time, Facebook prioritized phones and tablets with this redesign. The result is a nearly identical layout whether you're on a desktop, smartphone or tablet. At Thursday's announcement, the overhaul was referred to as "a very mobile-inspired web design" of everything from typefaces to navigation boxes.
The updated news feed will begin rolling out immediately for desktops and over the next few weeks on tablets and phones. You can hop on a waiting list to be among the first to get it here.
Unless you still hate it. In which case, you might be better off going here instead.
Follow Jonathan Anker on Twitter @JonFromHLN
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