Home
tech
An In-Depth Look At The New Facebook, Which Is A Huge Upgrade

An In-Depth Look At The New Facebook, Which Is A Huge Upgrade

When you first log into the new Facebook, a series of dialogue boxes appear to show you new features. The first shows you the new choice of feeds

The new Facebook.com has a left-hand menu for navigation, much like Facebook apps already do

This is where to go for help, later.

This is how videos look in the new News Feed. They're bigger, and can play right there.

Another change: Stories shared from the same publisher get pulled together into a mid-page skybox. It's attractive.

The new Facebook's biggest change is that it's now much easier to see different versions of the News Feed. Let's check some out.

This is a feed of only friends from college. I love how the cover photo for the feed is an old photo full of college friends.

This is "All Friends." Normally, Facebook tries to guess which friends you want to hear from. Here it does not. You might encounter people you forgot about here.

The "Following" feed is full of content from the celebrities, news sources, and other pages you subscribe to. Facebook came up with some pretty poor/insulting suggestions for me.

This is the "Photos" feed. It's lovely, actually. Makes sense, since photo-sharing is Facebook's primary function. I like how Facebook tiled my friends new profile photos and cover photos.

This is the "Games" feed. Apparently I only have one friend who still spams everyone with games

This is the "Music" feed. I like how Facebook chose a cover image based on the music I like. Also, check out the new way Facebook shows that multiple users "Like" something

I can imagine using the "Music" feed to figure out what I should be listening to, and keeping up with bands that I like. Already, I found this video series from Weezer, which I hadn't even known was on Facebook.

This is the "Groups" feed. It's pretty boring and looks unused – much like Facebook groups. Oh well.

So, how'd Facebook do?

The new News Feed is a huge upgrade.

It cleans up the site design quite a bit, and it makes the photos bigger.

That's important, because Facebook is primarily a photo-sharing site.

The new feeds are handy.

I'd gotten bored of going to Facebook and seeing the same three people posting photos and video(even though I like and/or love those three people very much).

The new Music, Photos, and All Friends feed will give me something to click on and good content to scroll through.

The "Following" feed would be more useful to me if I weren't such an active Twitter user – where I actively follow a huge list of people and publishers.

Facebook could improve the News Feed even more by establishing partnerships with video content providers from ESPN to HBO to Al Jazeera to bring curated content to a "Video" feed.

View Other Slidelists