Last week Facebook announced that it would be rolling out changes to its home page sometime this week. That has now begun.
Enthusiasm has been building greatly over the past week. Within 20 minutes of an official Facebook blog post on the launch it had already received 98 comments, most of which were pretty positive.
The changes have been compared to a more Twitter-like model, with status updates being converted to “The Publisher” which lets people simply create a message, or share media with their friends.
And updates come in real-time now of course, which truly puts it into Twitter territory. “News Feed is now a stream of everything that is being intentionally shared by a user’s friends and connections, making it simple for them to comment and participate in conversations that are most relevant in real-time,” the company says. Filters also allow users to control exactly who and what they see in their stream.
The re-designed Highlights section shows users the most important activity that’s happened over a longer period of time – as opposed to the stream, which shows users what’s happening in real time. This section will show stuff like photos, notes, events, links, etc.
Facebook says the update will happen slowly, but everyone should be seeing the new home page in the coming days. So if you are not seeing yet, relax, it’s on the way. I’m not even seeing it myself yet.
