The NEW Facebook Layout: Love it or Hate it, Get Used to it!

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So you may have noticed a few different features when you signed in to Facebook today, maybe not if you live in the UK time zone, but don’t worry you will soon see them.

As my friend Dillon Rhodes described it:

There has been plenty of vocal ‘haters’ of the new layout, I’m sure you have seen the amusing images being shared around.  Please remember though, this network is provided for us to use for free or not use, and Facebook can and do what they please.  If you don’t like it….

This video came straight from Facebook – a short explanation (under 2 minutes) of the recent changes.

For a more complete understanding of how your news feed has changed, I recommend you check out the Facebook Help Center, but for a down-to-earth easy to understand guide to the ‘New Facebook Changes’, read my version below:

The ‘Ticker’ and How to Remove it

If you are like many of the 750 million users just checking out the new profiles, at first it will be a little confusing, especially the real time ticker in the top right hand cornor of your screen.  Depending on how many interactive friends you have, this could be constantly flickering and moving about.  If it is distracting you, simply mouse over the double lines at the bottom of the ticker and click and drag up.  Or down if you want to see more entries.  This feature will be familiar to you if you are a frequent Twitter user and especially when participating in high volume Twitter ‘Chats’.  There is so much interaction going on it is hard to keep up with the never ending scrolling news feed.

If minimising the ticker is not enough, there is another way; in Chrome, simply install the Hide Facebook SideBar Ticker extension and the ticker will vanish.

In Firefox, you will need to install a user script. To do so, first install the Greasemonkey add-on and then install this user script. When prompted, restart Firefox and the ticker will be gone. Do note that this user script removes the entire right column of Facebook, including the ticker, event invitations, ads, sponsored stories, friends’ photos, and so on so maybe not worth the hassle.  Don’t want to forget those Birthdays!  Please bear in mind that these tools are very new and may still be buggy so proceed with caution.

The Top Blue Nav Bar

Yes it has changed again, only 2 tabs now; your profile name and a Home button.  The Arrow next to the Home button will take you to all your familiar Account and Privacy Settings etc.  The best thing about this new bar is that it stays ‘fixed’ at the top of your screen.  Does not matter how far down the page you scroll, you will be able to access the Home and Profile buttons.  No more scrolling back to the top!

Customising the ‘New’ News Feed

The new Facebook News Feed ‘AKA’ Your Personal Newspaper, now has a more personal feel and just like in a newspaper, the most interesting stories are always at the top.  While you are away from Facebook, the first posts you will most likely see when you return are the top photos and status updates posted by your friends while you were gone. These new top stories/posts will be marked with blue corner.

Facebook determines a ‘top story’ on the basis of the relationship you have to the person who posted, how many comments/likes the post has received, the type of story it is and when it was posted. This is simialr the the algorithm Facebook has used in the past.  If you have a top story that really is of no interest to you, easily remove it from the top stories section by hovering over the right side of the update and click ‘Unmark as top story’.  You can also add stories to your Top Stories simply by clicking the corner where the blue triangle should be to ‘Mark as Top Story’.

You can also control the feed by filtering the friends lists. You can also ‘Hide’ a particular story and the ‘Hide all by’ and ‘Unsubscribe’ will remove all content from that particular user and allow you to keep your news feed clean.

Don’t worry, it is easy to un-hide people and pages, just go to your profile Home Page and hover your mouse to the left of the side of the ‘News Feed’, click on ‘Edit’ then make your selection and hit ‘Save’.

The Subscribe Button

Don’t be scared of using this powerful new feature, the Subscribe button is very cool.  Until now, you could not control what updates or shared media you wanted to see from a particular friend’s wall.  If you click the subscribe button on a friends wall you will see a list of options that you can tick or untick depending on what you want to receive from that particular friend. You can set it to just see photos from one friend and maybe see nothing at all from another friend.

The other great feature of the subscribe button is that you can subscribe to the public feed of people whom you look up to, find interesting or a public figure, industry expert and even celebrities.  This means you will receive their public status updates in your newsfeed without having to request a friendship. Only the updates they set to ‘Public’ will be shared with their subscribers.  And yes, this will ‘mostly’ mean an end to a need for Public Figures/Personal Brands to have a separate Facebook Page for the business side of their profile.  You can ensure that your subscribers will only ever see your public messages.

You can learn more about the Facebook Subscribe Button here.

Friends and Smart Lists

When you ‘friend’ someone on Facebook now, You now have the option to designate new and existing friends to specific friend lists.  Newly friended ‘friends’ will be added as a ‘close friend’ or ‘acquaintance’.  The ‘close friend’ option means that you will always see their posts.  The ‘acquaintance’ option means you will only see their important posts. Don’t worry, they are not notified  of which option you choose.  You will now only receive notifications when a ‘close friend’ makes an update, but don’t worry, you can turn them off too if they get too much. Just click on the ‘Close Friend’ list and turn your notifications on or off in the top right-hand corner.

Facebook will automatically start you off with a few smart friend lists based on your profile info and how it matches with friends such as school, work, family, city, mutual friends. You can also create your own friend and family lists. Yes, this is very similar to the Google+ circles feature.

And even more changes…

• You no longer need to obtain 25 ‘likes’ in order to get a custom Facebook username for your business page BUT recent testing has shown that this only applies for one instance.  Once you have used up your free pass, you will need to collect 25 ‘likes’ before you get your next vanity url.  So don’t waste your ticket like I did!
• Email notifications from Facebook have decreased, but you can still edit the frequency in your Notification Settings.
• View the ‘Shares’ on your posts easily by clicking the ‘View Share’ button underneath your update.
• Status updates and comments character lengths have increased to a whopping 5000 and 8000 from just 500.
• Last but not least, Facebook has made album design a bit more aesthetically pleasing.  Albums that appear in your news feed show three photos for a more creative viewing experience.  The album cover is much larger than the others, scarily like a certain Google+…

….What about Facebook Pages?

You may have noticed that you are seeing less posts from the pages you have liked.  This may or may not be a new thing, but it is all to do with Facebook’s EdgeRank.  If you have not been interacting with a page as a fan then that pages posts will very rarely show in your feed anymore.  To ensure you never miss an update from your favourite pages, be sure to visit them and leave a few comments and likes around their page, just to let Facebook know you are a true ‘fan’.

If you need to refresh your memory, and perhaps discover some forgotton pages, go to https://www.facebook.com/pages and click on the ‘My Pages’ link at the top.  You can also find this list on your Info tab under Activities and Interests.  Some say that Facebook is going to make business pages pay to get back in the stream of people who are not actively visiting your page, by way of Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories, but I don’t think Facebook will punish Page Admins that bad.  Just keep the interacting and engagement going on your page and ‘she’ll be right’.

So…

I am all thumbs up for the new Facebook changes, already I have seen how much more interactive Facebook users are.  I’m sure by the time most people read this post some of the information here will be outdated and old news so I hope to keep it updated weekly with any new features that are still to be released. The annual Facebook Developers Conference starts tomorrow (F8) and recently Mashable’s Ben Parr said,

I have heard of a Facebook Music feature being released, perhaps even a Video platform.  What do you think is coming from today’s F8 conference?

And more importantly, let me know your thoughts on the above information I just shared, do you Love or Hate the new changes?  Let me know what I have missed and I will update the post if I need to.