Facebook introduces changes to layout, including updated news feed

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Facebook has once again changed its layout – and users are not pleased.

On Wednesday, the social networking site unveiled changes to its news feed and a “ticker” of updates happening in real time.

“Dislike, too many feeds going on,” Paulina Sulej wrote on the CityNews.ca page.

Debbie Eden agreed. “Hate it hate it hate it. Why are they always changing it??”

“Don’t see the huge deal with fb changing,” Justin Zoras countered. “We’ll get used to it in 8 hours cause we’re all addicted and will still get our fix anyways.”

The news feed, which used to appear in chronological order, will now rank items by importance – not date.

Facebook said the updated news feed will recognize when users haven’t logged on in a while.

“If you haven’t returned in a week, you may want to see a summary of top stories first. If you’ve already visited several times that day, you probably care more about recent news,” Mark Tonkelowitz, an engineering manager at Facebook, wrote on the site. 

Facebook also introduced a ticker, which will allow you to see what your friends are doing in real-time. The feature appears in the upper-right hand corner.
 
“Why do I need to see everyone’s status updates in my main feed and then repeated in that right-hand scroll bar? Where have my event invites gone?” Andrea Douglas wrote.

Ticker will allow users to respond to a comment or photo without navigating off their current screen.

There are nearly 17 million Canadians on Facebook — nearly half the population — and of those, 2.6 million users are in Toronto, according to Facebook.

Not a fan of the Facebook changes? A CityNews.ca reader just passed this along (we’re not sure how long this will be in effect though): Don’t like the new Facebook look? Change your preferred language to English UK and it will go back.

What do you think of the changes? Have your say in the comments or on our Facebook page.