Declutter Your Facebook Newsfeed

Facebook News Feed Article

Facebook, the free popular social networking website, is continually reinventing the way users access social media and how the information is generated and displayed to the public. It looks like it’s now about to become even more customisable for individual users, based on recent mobile news feed tests.

Currently up for redesigning and relaunching is the Facebook news feed interface with improvements in how the information can be displayed and what information users can choose to view (or not view).

In an endeavour to allow users to separate the news feed out into specific categories, Facebook are now testing secondary categories within the mobile news feed. This will enable users to reduce the clutter to be found displayed in their news feeds, if they want to. The information normally displayed in the Facebook news feed is varied by topic and displays content based on an algorithm. Depending on the audience it’s being displayed to, it’s often irrelevant and users may choose to skip over the information. After the redesign and rollout of the possible new categorisation methods, users may not have to skip over anything or wade through information they consider pointless and irrelevant.

In the test, the mobile Facebook news feed was separated out into different categories, such as food, health and fitness, travel and music, amongst others. Mobile users could browse different categories and the information found within that news feed was relevant to that category.

new-facebook-newsfeed

Users were also able to specify which category or categories they particularly wanted to see in their news feed, and the specific news they wanted to view within that category.

Users were still able to view the news feed in the traditional format, ie everything all in one place, and if they didn’t swipe through the other categories then the posts that showed up appeared with category tags under the title.

Based on the test, it seems that the Facebook news feed is likely to be able to be customised for each user, based on their specific interests, and may end up being as diverse as the people who are using it. These changes enable the news feed to be truly customisable for individual users and will continue to prove that the social networking website is becoming even more indispensable than ever.

If the news feed redesign is widely rolled out, it may not look exactly as it did during the mobile testing phase, given that Facebook is continually testing a lot of new changes. Not all of them will obviously make the final cut. And there are of course some concerns about the curation team ‘preventing conservative topics appearing in the highly influential sections of the newsfeed’.

new-newsfeed-facebook

These claims have been raised and no-one is sure if they are for real or not, but at least Facebook has been open about these concerns.

In any event, it seems like Facebook users can look forward to some exciting changes in the way they view their news feed and in the way they gather information via the social network.

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