The updated Timeline, originally launched in September 2011, will allow users to designate their favorite books, movies, and music, which makes sense as the updated news feed has specific tabs where users can view recommendations and news related to categories like music (Om wrote last week that he thought adding an emphasis on music was a smart element to the re-design). Clearly, Facebook needs more users thinking of the site as a place to talk about music, and emphasizing this on Timeline could help.

If users see a book or movie that a friend has marked as a favorite, Facebook will make it easier for the user to mark it as their favorite as well.

When asked about the influence of the news feed changes on the Timeline updates, a Facebook spokesperson replied that “The new News Feed and timeline work together to now show a more visual experience. Both make you and your friends’ activity and app stories more prominent,” and it’s hard not to draw a link between the timing and similarities between the two changes.

Users will also have a dedicated space on the Timeline to show their activity in other apps, and Facebook used Instagram as an example in announcing the Timeline tweaks. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Instagram wouldn’t receive preferential treatment on the Facebook platform, it’s clear that the new Timeline is a way for users to incorporate their photos on the site, a feature that didn’t get much mention last week. And it could encourage other third-party developers to integrate more heavily with Facebook’s platform.

The Timeline is also getting an updated design that’s more in line with the new news feed, with a cleaner look and simpler layout. The company said it would be rolling out the changes over the next few weeks.

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As media theorist Clay Shirky has pointed out, the purpose newspapers originally served was to aggregate a wide range of information for readers who couldn’t get access to that information in any other way. A newspaper collected everything from news of events in far-off countries to weather reports, from horoscopes and comic strips and classified ads to cooking columns and political analysis. Around the turn of the century or so, this qualified as a breakthrough information-delivery technology.

Facebook wants to recreate the newspaper

We all know what happened next: first radio news and then television news ate into the market that newspapers used to have to themselves, and finally the internet came along to deliver the coup de grace. The ability to distribute information around the world at virtually zero cost disrupted what was left of the virtual monopoly that most newspapers relied on, and the social web — and what Om has called the “democratization of distribution” it unleashed — has accelerated that process even further.

Now, the functions a newspaper used to perform have been dis-aggregated, unbundled and dispersed: classified advertising is handled by services like Craigslist and eBay, political analysis has been taken over by dedicated sites like Politico and Talking Points Memo, networks like CollegeHumor and BuzzFeed fulfill the entertainment function that comic strips used to provide, and real-time news of all kinds increasingly arrives via Twitter — as well as photo and video-sharing services like Instagram and YouTube.

In a sense, Facebook has been trying to put much of this content back together for some time now. It has reached out to news companies to create things like “social news reader” apps (although that seems to have backfired rather badly), and it has tried to make the news feed a one-stop shop for users who want to find out not just what their friends and families are up to, but what brands or topics they are interested in are doing.

Facebook is doing this for much the same reason that newspapers did: because it makes an appealing package for advertisers. And the social network has a leg up on its legacy competitors in a number of ways, including the fact that it can target users much more precisely than newspapers ever could, based on any number of factors such as their interests, age or location. In other words, Facebook has a far better chance of becoming a newspaper than newspapers have of becoming a social network.

But being a newspaper has its drawbacks

Despite all those strengths, however, Facebook is in fundamentally the same position as newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been for years — namely, trying to aggregate enough interesting content together so that it can appeal to as many eyeballs as possible, and then sell access to those eyeballs to advertisers. And it has done an incredible job of doing this, racking up more than a billion users and levels of engagement that newspapers can only dream of. But it is still a middleman, just as newspapers were.

And the appeal of Facebook and other networks isn’t the only thing that has helped drive advertisers away from newspapers. Brands have also realized that the same media disruption that is killing newspapers gives them the tools to compete with the media outlets they used to rely on — by becoming publishers in their own right, creating their own newsrooms and “brand journalism,” and promoting sponsored content on new-media networks such as BuzzFeed (something we’ll be talking about at paidContent Live in New York on April 17). In other words, Facebook is not the only game in town.

Some prominent advertising experts — including Sir Martin Sorrell of the massive marketing conglomerate WPP Group — aren’t convinced that Facebook is even that useful for advertising, since they see it primarily as a social network designed for entertainment. And the more Facebook tries to adapt its newsfeed so that it becomes more appealing for advertisers, the more likely it is to irritate users who feel their feed is being tweaked and filtered in ways they don’t really understand.

In the end, Facebook may succeed in building the world’s best personalized newspaper — but doing this may not be as valuable as the company or its shareholders might have hoped.

Images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

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It was a good reminder. Back in 2007, the News Feed was a lot boxier. It had a lot fewer photos. There was more text, and everything seemed smaller.

In those early days, Facebook pioneered a different look that distinguished it from competitors like MySpace, offering a cleaner design and fewer options and customization for users. It was a new approach, and it worked. But the amount of content shared to the site has grown by an astounding amount since those days, as you’d expect from a site with now over a billion active users, and the News Feed hadn’t exactly kept pace. It had started to look cluttered and dated, and navigation (not to mention surfacing interesting content) was a challenge.

Mark Zuckerberg takes questions after announcing the updated News Feed in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters on March 7.

So from a visual perspective, Thursday’s update clears out most of the clutter from the homepage, taking Facebook back to its original design proposition of simplicity and filtering. And it emphasizes the idea of Facebook as the “local newspaper,” bringing you a small slice of the most interesting and informative posts on the homepage — and giving you sections where can dive deeper into the material where you want.

I wrote on Wednesday about the three advantages Facebook still has that I didn’t think it should break with the new design: content discovery (showing you interesting things you hadn’t previously discovered), visual media (photos and videos still look the best on Facebook’s page), and the content directory (taking advantage of all your friends and their information on the site.) In many ways, the re-design announced Thursday played perfectly into these three strengths, primarily the first two.

“We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a wide variety of content,” Zuckerberg explained during the hour-long presentation.

With content discovery, the new News Feed — structured after the metaphorical newspaper — is all about giving you more content to read and discover (in fact, it seems more like a consumption page now than one for sharing — interesting to consider that users are probably sharing more from mobile devices than desktops now). The re-design introduces tabs on the top right of the page that let you toggle your view: “All Friends” (who you haven’t hidden from the newsfeed), “Close Friends” (an older feature where you can designate certain people), “Following” (pages and people you subscribe to), “Groups,” “Photos,” “Games,” “Music,” and “Other.”

In each of these categories, users will be able to select specific set of content to dive into. “All Friends” gives users a chronological series of updates from friends, providing a feature that Facebook employees said was highly requested from users (especially considering the criticism the News Feed algorithms and perceived lack of transparency have faced in the past.)

The “Following” page serves as almost like a page for news, assuming you like any celebrities, journalists, news outlets, or organizations on the site who post updates. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton recently criticized the company for not sharing his posts with subscribers as much as he would expect, and while the company refuted his claims, the Following page certainly addresses this need for asynchronous relationships and sharing.

And the company emphasized music — the music page will show songs your friends are listening to through apps like Spotify that use the company’s Open Graph. Each of these tabs give you a new set of information to dig into and greater control over the information you see.

From a design perspective, the emphasis on photos is a huge part of what’s new. Photos are far more dominant in the main news feed, appearing larger in previews and playing on two obvious influences: the Instagram experience of a continuous photo scroll, and design for mobile that inherently incorporates a simpler, stripped-down look.

While it’s still slightly unclear how advertising will play into the changes, since the company gave virtually no attention to ads on Thursday, it seems obvious, as The Atlantic pointed out, that the larger visuals the company debuted will play perfect with ads when they get the same treatment as user photos. Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call it’s something the company should provide. Mike Isaac for AllThingsD pointed out that for Facebook, it’s all about giving people compelling visuals, and surely that will go for ads as well.

Michael Reckhow, a product manager for mobile newsfeed, said they had worked so hard to build a cleaner mobile feed, that in looking at the desktop, they realized they’d already devised many of the solutions they needed:

“Mobile is inherently simpler,” he said. So it’s fair to say that in some ways, you’ve already seen the new Facebook — on your phone.

For Facebook, the question is how users will respond to the updated look. Hopefully for the company, adoption of the new features will go the opposite way of print newspaper subscriptions.

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Eliza Kern live-blogged the event for us this morning, hosted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several Facebook product executives, and will have more on the new design later today. But here are the highlights:

• Facebook introduced new dedicated feeds that allow you to see just the photos, music, and business pages that you’re following on the service, in addition to being able to follow all of your friends’ updates as usual.
• It also changed the left-hand menu navigation bar, which is also now consistent across devices. It will always be present, as opposed to previous designs where it could be hidden behind the main page.
• Facebook didn’t spend a lot of time talking about ads, rather surprisingly.
• The new design will be rolling out to Facebook’s 1 billion users over the next few weeks, but you can speed up the process by getting on a waiting list here.

Here’s a link to Facebook’s press release on the redesign.

And here’s a before and after comparison provided by Facebook:

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Facebook is going to be launching some new features for its feed on Thursday, which may include new ways of filtering specific kinds of content and possibly new advertising features. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to show you everything, without filtering or ranking it in any way. Which method is better? That depends on how and why you are using it.

Much of Bilton’s criticism revolves around what some call the “subscribe” function, which allows users to get updates from others without having to ask their permission. When it launched in the fall of 2011, it was widely seen as an attempt to copy Twitter’s “asymmetric following” model, since Twitter lets users get updates from whoever they wish — whereas Facebook’s model has always been symmetric, in the sense that users must agree to be friends before they can see each other’s updates. Late last year, Facebook changed the name of this feature to “follow,” which made the similarity to Twitter even more obvious.

Do you want to see everything in your feed?

As an attempt to copy Twitter, the follow feature seems to be largely a failure — at least if the experiences of Bilton and others who have complained about Facebook’s newsfeed, such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, are anything to go by. They say they don’t get much engagement, which makes them question whether their content is even reaching their subscribers, and whether Facebook is tweaking their feed so that certain kinds of updates don’t show up as frequently.

The last time this topic came up, when Cuban and actor George Takei were criticizing the network because of the lack of engagement from subscribers, a number of Facebook users attacked the company for filtering their feeds and not showing them all of the updates from pages or individuals they were following. Some users said the equivalent of: “If I subscribe to someone, I want to see all their updates, not just the ones that you choose to show me.”

swipe at facebook: 'there's no algorithm standing between you and your audience' - @adambain gets feisty.

—
Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) March 07, 2013

In a nutshell, this is the fundamental difference between Twitter and Facebook: the former doesn’t apply any filters to the stream of updates users get, apart from those required by law — if you follow a couple of thousand users, as I do, then you get all of the updates from all of those users, and they flow past you in a giant river of undifferentiated tweets, in reverse chronological order.

Facebook, however, applies all kinds of algorithmic tweaks to a newsfeed based on what some call EdgeRank (although this isn’t a term Facebook uses internally, according to Anthony De Rosa of Reuters), and therefore some updates are more prominent than others, and in some cases updates may never appear at all. Users have control over some of the knobs and dials that will hide or reveal certain kinds of posts, but there is also a lot of filtering that goes on behind the scenes, which makes Facebook a bit of a Google-style black box.

It’s hard to know what you’re missing

Depending on how you see them, these two different approaches can be a good thing or a bad thing: Twitter’s method is theoretically more transparent and comprehensive, since it is completely unfiltered — but it can also be overwhelming, and the network has worked hard to try and help users cope with this vast stream of content, via things like the Discover tab. Facebook’s method seems a lot more invasive and secretive, but at the same time it can make it easier to cope with the never-ending ocean of content — an average of 2,000 posts a day for each user.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a useful analogy for the difference between the two: Twitter is a little like real-time TV news, while Facebook functions more like a DVR that lets you watch things after they have happened (although to some extent the network chooses what to show you, which your DVR doesn’t). They are two very different experiences of a social stream.

While Facebook users might complain that they want to see everything their social graph posts, the reality is that they likely wouldn’t see everything anyway — unless they sat on their computer all day long reading everything that was posted. Most die-hard Twitter users likely don’t see everything their followers post either, unless they watch the network 24 hours a day, and many use lists (as I do) to try and cope with the volume of content that is posted, or services like Paper.li that allow them to “time shift” that content and catch up with it later.

In the end, the question hangs not just on how you want to handle that stream of updates from your social graph, but who you trust to do that management for you: in the case of Twitter, you are pretty much on your own, and that can be chaotic — but there is a certain purity to it. With Facebook, you have some tools at your disposal to manage that content, but the network itself also does a lot behind the scenes without telling you much about how it works. Facebook says it’s for your own good, but how do you really know what you are missing?

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But we’re still not sure exactly how Facebook might change the design and/or features of this service. Until the event starts at 10am PT, check out my thoughts on the things Facebook really shouldn’t break in this update.

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Digg, the link-sharing site that was once the top of the social-news heap, has launched a new feature it hopes will bring users back to the service: Newswire allows readers to create their own filtered view of the links that are being submitted to Digg in real time, which the site calls “sifting for diamonds.” But after a disastrous redesign that caused many users to flee the network, and the departure of founder and chief visionary Kevin Rose — not to mention the rise of Twitter and newer sharing platforms like Google+ — can new features such as Newswire help the site recapture any of its faded glory?

As Digg staffer Will Larson describes on the company blog, the Newswire allows users to not only see posts appear in real time as they are submitted to the site, but to filter that stream based on a number of factors — including the number of Diggs they have received, what topic they are related to, and whether they contain video or images. There’s also a “trending” view that ranks the posts coming in by how quickly they are receiving Digg votes. In a break with Digg tradition, the Newswire also shows who “buried” or voted down a post or link, which the site hopes will increase transparency.

Filtering incoming links and watching them appear in real time is a handy thing to have. But is the new Digg feature anything revolutionary? Not really. Some reviewers have called it a “radical experiment” in social news, but it’s anything but radical. Many users already get a similar blend of trending links and commentary from Twitter and related services such as Topsy and Tweetmeme that show popularity — and a number of apps like Flipboard and Zite provide a curated, real-time newswire-style experience. Does Digg bring something dramatically different to the table? Not that I can see.

Even a Digg staffer notes in a comment on the thread about the Newswire launch that “making upcoming real time with Newswire is simply catching up with the general trends,” while one long-time Digg user described it as being little more than an updated version of an earlier feature called Digg Spy, which was launched in 2005. While the Digg users commenting on the launch seem to think the Newswire is a great addition, it’s not clear whether it will be enough to draw in new users or bring back old ones.

Digg Version 4 repelled users

Many of those departed users, who in some cases were Digg’s most devoted fans, fled the service after a mammoth redesign, known internally as Version 4. The redesign was in the works for more than a year, but when it launched last summer, it sparked widespread criticism and outrage from existing users — in part because it was seen as altering the independent culture of the site by appealing too much to mainstream media sites. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Digg competitor Reddit, said in an open letter to Kevin Rose that the redesign “reeks of VC meddling” and was little more than “cobbling together features from more popular sites,” and many users seemed to agree.

In the months following the launch of the new design, Rose stepped down as CEO to be replaced by Matt Williams, who almost immediately apologized for the flaws in the redesign — and the site proceeded to undo or roll-back almost all of the changes that had been made (and laid off about 40 percent of its staff at the same time). But the damage had already been done: Digg’s user base continued to decline, to the point where Compete.com says it is now only slightly larger than Reddit with about 3 million unique visitors a month, down from more than 8 million a year ago.

In terms of overall traffic, Compete says that Reddit is now about twice as large as Digg, with 14 million page views a month to Digg’s 7 million, while Quantcast shows Reddit as being almost three times larger in unique visitors and four times the size of Digg in terms of monthly page views with about 44 million to Digg’s 9 million.

In a move that seemed to cement the network’s decline in popularity, founder Kevin Rose left Digg earlier this year, and has started a new incubator for mobile apps and services called Milk. Matt Williams said earlier this year that the site’s traffic had “stabilized” and that he continues to believe Digg can be a major player when it comes to filtering the news that continues to bombard web users from multiple sources.

But while features like Newswire may be positive additions to the former superstar’s bag of tricks, it’s going to take a lot more than me-too services to bring back its faded glory. The harsh truth is that Digg’s time may have come and gone.

Disclosure: Milk is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Although those are some pretty impressive figures, the news is perhaps most notable for how it has been made public: through a case of mistaken identity and the modern world of instant public broadcasting. A Google employee named Patrick Barry received an email at his Gmail account apparently intended for TouchTunes’ CFO, also named Patrick Barry.

Apparently amused, Barry promptly relayed the news in a public post on his Google+ account:

In case anyone cared, touchtunes.com just got $45M series E investment at a $300M valuation. People really should remember not to mis-type their email addresses when sending confidential stuff like this – it turns out that I am not pbarry@touchtunes.com.

I’ve reached out to TouchTunes for comment, as well as to Google’s Patrick Barry. I’ll update this post with any additional information I receive.

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The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.

Facebook, which said in a statement it was “humbled” and “pleased” by the patent, may well choose not to enforce it. In fact, one of the more important social networking patents, from the early site Six Degrees, was bought by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Tribe.net/Zynga’s Mark Pincus explicitly to promote an open playing field for the sector by taking it away from people who might choose to enforce it in the courts. However Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.

The core invention of the Facebook patent is as follows:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. In some embodiments, the method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items. The method further includes limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further includes displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers.

Here’s Facebook’s statement, provided by email:

The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook¹s history
and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information
on the site. We¹re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time
and pleased with being awarded the patent.

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Please see the disclosure in my bio with regards to Facebook.

The social network overhauled the design of its news feed back in the spring to put the stream of real-time updates down the center of the page — similar to micromessaging site Twitter. It also created a “Highlights” section on the right-hand side of the page that contained select older content about your friends’ activity on the site, such as recently uploaded photo albums and links to articles and videos your friends shared. The new version is moving the “Highlights” section to the middle of the page, where it was located prior to the spring redesign.

When asked if Facebook is rolling out the new version to get away from looking similar to Twitter, Facebook product manager Peter Deng said, “I don’t think we were trying to be like Twitter. Status updates have been on the page since 2006.” He added: “We’re showing you content that’s more popular when you first log in. But when you switch to live feed, it looks how it does today.”

The latest news feed design just went live; it will be gradually rolled out to all of Facebook’s 300 million users throughout the day.

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