Facebook is launching a new-look home page for its 175m users and adding features that can boost the presence of businesses and brands on the social networking service.
In a presentation at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about making Facebook more “real time”, referring to the popularity of the micro-blogging service Twitter.
Not for the first time, Facebook also seems to be following the earlier-stage lifestreaming service FriendFeed with its new features. It added Friendfeed-style comments to its newsfeed in an earlier revamp. Now a new newsfeed of activity on the home page will be able to be filtered to show particular groups of friends, networks, applications, products or services.
The feed will be updated in an almost “live” fashion and users will have a Publisher tool to embellish their status updates with links, photos, videos and mini blog posts.
Facebook is also going to great lengths to cater to the needs of media companies, major brands and other businesses – a growing presence on the service and key to its profitability.
Facebook Pages – a service similar to MySpace in catering for bands, brands and well known personalities rather than ordinary individual users – is being supplemented with the ability to have Profiles like individual users and with tools allowing the sharing of all types of content with an unlimited number of users.
Facebook has an impressive list of partners for the launch including President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the band U2 and CNN.
Asked about the revenue opportunities from the improvements, Mr Zuckerberg suggested there were more indirect advantages than the usual ability to serve more ads to users.
“With this, people are sharing more information and getting more value out of the site and spending more time on it,” he said.
“Even with our current models of advertising, those are the drivers [of revenue]. But there are also new models – the concept of being connected with someone has a lot of value. Once you have a connection through streams, over the lifetime of that there will be many [ad ] impressions and clicks and that will be a valuable metric.”
Writing later on his blog, Mr Zuckerberg hinted there would be announcements soon on more upcoming products. The new home page and changes to Facebook Pages will be brought in on March 11.
