3 Important Newsfeed Changes That Facebook Launched This Week

The news feed is the first thing that you see when you arrive on Facebook and it really is the fluid content rich feature that drives most of the engagement on the site. They are constantly making changes to the feed in an attempt to improve user experience (and in recent times to increase revenues through ads) and just this week Facebook introduced 3 major changes that will change what we all see in the feed. This can be confusing for the end user who wants to simply see their best friends and updates and photos from family but with so many developers and 3rd parties dependent on the news feed for distribution of their apps and Facebook themselves trying to figure out what you want to see more changes can be expected on an ongoing basis. In some ways a lot of the success that Facebook have had comes down to the constant changes and improvements that they make and the fact that they don’t listen to their users all that much. Here are 3 major changes that you will be seeing in your news feed on an ongoing basis…

Games Within The Feed

Games have always been one of the the things that keep people coming back and users engaged on the social network but they are a pain to get opened and launch at times. Facebook this week started rolling out new lightweight versions of the games that play right within the news feed. It is hoped that this will entice more users in to the full versions of the game and for developers it is a great way of getting people to play your game without ever leaving the news feed. You can read more about how this works in more detail here.

Trending Videos

Much has been made of the success of the new wave of video sharing apps on Facebook who are relying on the viral distribution of the ticker and news feed. Some of the content is pretty poor within these apps though which is why Facebook have just started testing a trending video feature which will help users discover more content based on what their friends are watching.

Starring Friends

Despite all of Facebook and Google’s best efforts to get us to start using lists to group our friends together it just doesn’t seem to be happening. Most people can’t be bothered making lists. In an attempt to find out the most relevant content to show you in your news feed Facebook are testing a new starring version on the site which makes it easy to tell them who you want to see more content from. This will drastically change which of your friend’s appear within your feed.