Facebook announced today that it will be launching some changes next week. These changes are related to your home page and to pages for public figures and organizations.
Pages for said figures and organizations will no operate like the profiles of the common folk. This should inspire greater communications between them and fans.
“Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations,” explains Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.”
As far as your home page, your status box will become the publisher box, which will allow you to share your status, photos, notes, videos or other things just as you would your status with the current set-up.
An explanation on the new home page tour explains: “You have one stream—your Wall—on your profile, and one stream on your home page that represents the on-going, flowing conversation between you and your friends.” Simple enough.
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The news feed will also start being updated on a real-time basis, which will truly make it much more Twitter-like. Luckily, they are also giving users more control over the content they see in the news feed. Filters will let you select users you want to see more updates from.
Some wonder if members will be upset with the new changes, like they were over the last design, even though ultimately they seemed to come around. To me, the new changes sound like improvements, and I will not be surprised to see more enthusiasm than dread.
