Making personal, more personal
I was reading an interesting article about Facebook launching a new type of feature to their web site. The company announced Thursday it has made a major change to their current news feed technology featuring larger pictures when users update their status. The new design is projected to be a big step for Facebook, and some may argue it could be similar to the launch of the timeline feature.
It focuses on having bigger pictures, multiple news feeds at once, and being able to access the site from any mobile device. The company is placing an emphasis on being able to access the site from a mobile device, which means they realize a lot of people are starting to purchase various forms of tablets to access the web. When people use the feature they will have access to a variety of feeds they can receive that include people they follow, friends, games, and even music. I believe it’s similar to the new feature on Twitter where users can receive certain tweets that are placed in categories.
The company stated that photos are considered to be over half of the stories placed currently on news feeds. So it seems the company is trying to stay in front of the competition with this new look, but installing features that your competitor has doesn’t really offer any uniqueness. While uniqueness is good to have for a social networking site like Facebook it can only go so far in my opinion because you have to keep up with current trends to somewhat of a degree.
I think it’s important for them to keep up with competitors if they know everything is turning into a digital age. If the company knows that over half of all the news feeds posted contain photos then it only makes sense to implement the new design. This change has been needed from some time now on the site, but I don’t believe it will be a huge hit with users since it copies features that have been in the social networking world for quite some time now.
It’s going to be interesting to see how people react to using the news feed technology, and if users start to place more photos in their updates instead of actual content. If this begins to happen I believe the majority of status updates will contain at least one picture in the future. If Facebook keeps up with the current digital trend going on it’s only a matter of time before text itself will be obsolete.
Is this technology considered to be an update more than a new design?
