Facebook unvealed a major update to their interface with news feeds and mini-feeds. Personally, I’ve been waiting a long time for this feature. Instead of checking dozens of your friend’s profiles to see what’s changed, Facebook now keeps track of the changes and reports them on each profile and also aggregates the information on the front page.

Each feed is called a “story”, and there are stories for networks, relationships, photos, and other status elements. Basically, anyone can easily keep up-to-date with any changes that their friends make to their profile. At the heart of it, users can now see the trail of updates that their friends make, which is really a compelling feature not seen in many other social networks.

Ironically, even though the new features are called feeds, there are no real RSS feeds to be seen. I would surely subscribe to an RSS feed that pings me everytime any of my friends make a change.

Certainly, the new feeds will keep me more in tune with what’s happening to my friends on Facebook. But, it will also mean I won’t be aimlessly surfing around Facebook as often looking for updates, which translates to less pageviews. It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s pageviews actually get lowered because of this feature.

Finally, there is the privacy issue. The personal stories and feeds harken the image of big brother looking over your shoulder as you change your profile. But as always, only your friends can see your profile and mini-feeds. Facebook has also placed little “x” marks beside each item that you can click on to hide it from other users.

Other smaller updates include the ability to collapse each element of a profile. Slowly, but surely, more AJAX is creeping into the Facebook interface.

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Categories - Social Networking |