Facebook blog just announced a new (but perhaps small) feature to your Facebook home page. ‘Today we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that’s happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now,’ said FB engineer Raylene Yung on the Facebook blog.
Called News feed and Live feed what differentiates the two streaming features is the clutter. Facebook puts its own brain to decide what is it that you should read which you probably might have missed while away from Facebook, which will go in to your News Feed. While Live feed will be the new live stream of your friends and connections on Facebook done real time.
The change will also bring back features that I believe were removed when they did their last major home page design change. So your friends’ social life comes back in to your News feed including photo tags, recent fan page additions, etc.
The newsfeed to me looks simply like merging the highlights section to the existing news/live feed. To those who might not have noticed, the highlight section is the right hand bar where all the stuff that your friends share and garner enough attention take rest in the social network. Why is the need to replicate what this section does on the newsfeed is not completely evident. All Facebook says is that is based on user feedback and requests. Will the highlights section continue the way it is another question that begs an answer now.
Now I wonder if this move has to do anything with the recent integration of FB and Bing to provide search results. Maybe unclutter the sidebar and move the highlights into newsfeeds, paving way for some bingable feature instead. A thought stretched maybe, but why not. While that be revealed sooner or later, for now your new Facebook homepage will look somewhat like this.
Another reason why this move is worth a note is because it is a step in the direction of limiting chaos. Noise on the web is at its peak now, there are tonnes and tonnes of data being generated every second. This has given rise to the concept of web 3.0. which fundamentally deals with noise reduction and content aggregation. Facebook perhaps just made a prototype to meet this need.
