Mark Zuckerberg & Co. on Friday issued invites to select members of the press to “Come see a new look for News Feed.” The media event takes place next Thursday, March 7, at 10am PST, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. To our non-US readers: it’s an affluent town at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. This invite-only press conference comes less than two months after the company’s January 15 Graph Search launch event.
Facebook has some pretty rabid community so we’re expecting all sorts of backlash when the new News Feed goes live. The company recently updated its iOS client with in-app VoIP calling and a revamped News Feed, with the Like, Comment and Share buttons now found alongside the bottom of posts…
Here’s the invite graphics, via Business Insider.
Not much is known by way of detail except that a new look News Feed is coming.
Our guess?
The company wants to inject more ads into your News Feed.
A mockup by TechCrunch published on January 14, if true, depicts a Flipboard-like News Feed.
Author Josh Constine swears he saw the updated software running on a smartphone with his own two eyes. The upcoming News Feed, he says, creates two separate feeds, each for a few different content types including news and photos.
Users navigate between them by swiping sideways on a photo that serves as a header tile filling the top quarter or so of a portrait layout iPhone screen. Below the header is a larger body tile that takes up most of the rest of the screen. From what I saw, it shows one story at a time, with text and who posted it laid on top of a full-screen image.
For example, instead of the screenshot above where most of the screen is taken up with white, blue, and gray chrome and empty space, the app looks like the mock-up below.
The mockup is Josh’s approximation from his memory so take it with a pinch of salt.
Facebook-owned Instagram earlier in the week announced it passed 100 million active users. The social networking giant also updated its iOS software development kit with better analytics, additional app usage metrics and improved APIs and has worked with carriers to roll out free or discounted Messenger access to 14 additional markets.
By the way, Facebook ranked 48th on Forbes’ Most Admired Companies list. Apple is #1 again and Twitter, which increasingly challenges Facebook, did not even make it into the top 50.
