Facebook Redesigning To Be More Like Twitter

March 4th, 2009 by Nick Gonzalez

Facebook had an open press conference today covering key changes in how the site operates. You can see live coverage from VentureBeat and TechCrunch.

As the title suggests, the redesign is making Facebook more like Twitter. The news feed will be even more real time, with new filters to let users trim the feed to people they’re interested in following. The other major change has been the elevation of Facebook Pages, usually used by personalities and brands, to profile like functionalities. Now pages will be able to also publish meaningful information to the newsfeeds of their fans.

These are minor usability tweaks that will make the user experience better. But the big change has been in the strategic vision of how Facebook is architected. Facebook consists of two major data structures, the friend graph, and the news feed. So far Facebook has focused heavily on expanding the “social graph”, however, today’s announcements put an even deeper focus on the expansion of news feed.

Facebook has openned more channels to put information into the feed, through Facebook Pages and Facebook Connect.

Screen shots via SAI:

Tags: facebook, facebook connect, twitter

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