Facebook’s Newsfeed Redesign Seeks To De-Clutter, Makes Everything Bigger

"Goodbye Clutter," says Facebook. Hello, likely user complaints.

“Goodbye Clutter,” says Facebook. Hello, likely user complaints.

Listen. You’re probably going to freak out about Facebook redesigning its newsfeed yet again, so let’s get that out of the way [cue freakout]. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to what Mark Zuckerberg and company announced today at the unveiling. Basically everything is getting a lot bigger and less cluttered.

From what the various livefeeds said during today’s Facebook announcement including the folks over at gigaom.com, the new design for the newsfeed is all about big — a larger portion of the screen will be filled with the newsfeed, and photos will be a lot bigger too. “Less clutter,” says Facebook’s design director.

Indeed, where there were once three columns on the newsfeed/homepage, it looks like there will only be two: One large one for all the content your friends are posting and then on the left, a spot for ads (although we can’t see where they’d go yet) and the navigation bar.

In that navigation bar are expanded options for what you see in your newsfeed — instead of just the most popular or most recent filtering options, you can choose from things like All Friends, Close Friends, Photos, Music, Following, etc. The more you use each tab, the more often they’ll show up as options.

And then there are updates on your feed from upcoming events — apparently not just stuff you have coming up on the calendar, but promoted things Facebook thinks you might want to check out. I’ve had a few of those lately and dismissed them, but others may find them helpful. This could also be where ads just happen to pop up, but that’s just my guess.

The new feed will have a “limited rollout today,” which you can find at facebook.com/newsfeed. You can opt in now, apparently, or wait until Facebook drags you kicking and screaming as it did with Timeline.

Facebook says it revamped the newsfeed because people asked for it, but we’re sure there will still be plenty of people ticked off at the change. That’s how it always goes, right?

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