Wolverton: Redesign makes Facebook more compelling, less cluttered - San Jose Mercury News

I've not always been happy about the changes Facebook has made over the years, but I like its update of the News Feed, which the company announced and started rolling out this week. The new News Feed is less cluttered and more graphically appealing. And it gives special prominence to photographs, which now represent about half of all post in the feed. I don't think Facebook has gone so far as to create a "personalized newspaper," as company CEO Mark Zuckerberg dubbed the new feed, and I worry about how Facebook will fit ads into the new design. But overall it's a welcome refresh. For Facebook users, the News Feed is essentially their home page on the site. It shows the latest updates from friends, posts from companies and organizations they've "liked," and pictures and links that friends have shared. Over the years, that page has grown increasingly cluttered. As Facebook has become more popular, the number of friends in users' social networks have expanded and so too have the number of pages they've liked, resulting in what can be an overwhelming number of posts feeding into the News Feed. Facebook has attempted to sort through the links, showing only those that are most important to users, but the News Feed still often looks like a cluttered list of updates, not much better than what you see on Twitter. The update aims to clean this up and make it more appealing. Photographs appear to be twice as large as before. To devote more room to pictures, Facebook is now superimposing users' initial comments about the pictures on top of them. But the News Feed is also devoting more room to other graphical elements, including videos, the thumbnail images Facebook typically includes next to links to news stories and maps, when someone shares their location. It doesn't exactly resemble a newspaper, but a lot of attention to graphical designclearly went into the update. Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews.com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEYxEeE61BqAQUqJ1RGECF_4VhNLA&url=http://www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton/ci_22748624/wolverton-redesign-makes-facebook-more-compelling-less-cluttered

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