Seo, Make Money Online and Technology

Facebook is working on redesign its home page again. The big picture is that Facebook is coming out with a more nuanced new home page that may serve as a better central place for consuming information from the site and from the web. It doesn’t look too different. The biggest change is that Facebook’s home page news feed will now be divided up into “top news” and a more real-time “recent activity” view.

The story about this came from a document intended for brand advertisers that was published 19 October, In this four page document, Facebook outlines the benefits of the redesign to advertisers who will clearly be affected.

First, Facebook states its goal for the new homepage: “simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams.”

There will be some sort of “Top Stories” feature and you will first see the most interesting recent items shared by your friends, via an algorithm determined by Facebook. To see the raw stream of information that Facebook introduced in the Twitter-like March redesign, you will have to click on a button called “recent activity.” Recent screenshots from live beta tests of the redesign have already confirmed this — and, actually, sources told us as much in June.

Also familiar: The March redesign added a “Highlights” section on the right-hand side of the home page, where it algorithmically displayed photos, events and other things that your friends commented, liked, or joined. Now, it will also be folded into “Top Stories.”

In other words, this new feature will include some algorithmically-generated relevancy calculation, looking at all sorts of data about an item, including the number of times it’s shared, commented, or liked. It will apparently work similar to how the pre-March news feed worked.

In addition, several types of activity stories that were lost with the March stream redesign will be added back to both the “top news” and “recent activity” views:

• friend acceptances
• relationships
• event RSVPs
• group memberships

Facebook Page- related stories will also appear in the top-news and real-time views:

• friends becoming a fan of a Page
• event RSVPs
• virtual gifts

Finally, birthdays will now appear above the fold, as the previous screenshots showed. Because people buy each other virtual gifts in Facebook’s Gift Store, this location may bring Facebook more virtual goods revenue.

Here’s Facebook’s full explanation:

“Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent.

Ultimately, Facebook believes these changes will increase engagement on the home page by surfacing more relevant stories to users.”

Summary: The new home page emphasizes on toggling between views and feeds in order to personalize the experience. It also decreases Facebook’s load time, which will likely have a major impact on time on site and bandwidth costs.

Second, Facebook then details the changes to the News Feed. There are two different ways to view it: the summary view (Top News) and the real-time view (Recent Activity). The first filter is a prominent feature of FriendFeed (FriendFeed) and likely the FriendFeed team had something to do with building Top News. It also looks like Facebook is removing the Highlights section on the right hand sidebar of the home page in favor of the Top News filter.

Summary : Facebook is bringing back a lot of new information to the News Feed.

And here’s from Facebook’s document:

“Facebook has also put information back into the stream that people have asked for, including photo tags, friend acceptances, relationships, Event RSVPs and group memberships. In addition, birthdays are now viewable above the fold.”

Third, Facebook believes the upcoming changes are a boon for brand advertisers. The first piece of news: fanning, RSVPs for events, and virtual gifts will reappear in the social stream organically, which makes it easier for brands to expand their reach across Facebook. The right column of the homepage is also stripped down, which will make ads on the home page more prominent.

The last thing Facebook addresses is the new designs impact on Pages. The company believes it will increase the number of new fans on Facebook pages. Their explanation:

“The opportunity to acquire Fans increases with this new home page design. This is due to several reasons including the migration of Fan stories into the center stream, and the increase in “Suggestions” from one to two connections.”

There is no indication of when this new design goes live, although if Facebook is sending this doc to select advertisers, the answer must be soon.