Facebook began rolling out a new look for the News Feed today. The update is purely a cosmetic one that will not affect advertising or anything else. The redesigned News Feed has a much cleaner look with less clutter.
In today’s update, the changes are all visual: a new font for the bulk of the text (Helvetica for Macs and Arial for PCs, the company tells me); a new “card” arrangement; bolder presentation for images; and a lighter and more simplified left-hand column — changes that will give the desktop experience more parity with Facebook’s mobile apps. The changes are getting turned on over the next few weeks worldwide.
To be clear, none of the changes affect advertising on the site, or how Facebook surfaces content to people: in other words, if you are a marketer on the social network, you don’t change anything. On that front, there will continue to be updates to the news feed algorithm over time, which will be posted about on in the News Feed FYI blog, notes Greg Marra, a product manager who I spoke to earlier.
There are quite a few other notable changes as well. Greg Marra, a product manager at Facebook says the goal was to simplify things for users as much as possible and to improve the experience on small devices.
