NEW YORK (AP) - Amid chatter of
"Facebook fatigue,"
real or imagined, the world's biggest social networking company is getting
ready to unveil a new version of News Feed, the flow of status updates, photos
and advertisements its users see on the site.
Facebook Inc. is hosting an event at its Menlo
Park, Calif., headquarters on Thursday to show off "a new look for News
Feed." The company offered no other details on what the changes will be in
an invitation sent to journalists and bloggers. It will be Facebook's second staged event at its
headquarters since the company's May initial public offering. The company
unveiled a search feature at the first one in January.
If past site changes are any
indication, the News Feed tweaks may take some getting used to and will likely
lead to user grumbles. Facebook
users often complain about changes to the site, whether it's cosmetic tweaks or
the overhaul of privacy settings.
Gartner analyst Brian Blau says one
change he'd like to see from Facebook
as a user is the ability to control how much he's seeing from the businesses
and other non-friend accounts he follows. Currently users can only tweak how
much they see from their friends, not from businesses they follow.
"We have a 'like' but there is
no degree of 'like,' it's binary," he says. "I need a 'like plus' or
even a 'like minus.'"
The event comes a month after a Pew
study reported that many Facebook
users take a break from the site for weeks at a time. The report, from the Pew Research
Center's Internet and
American Life Project, found that some 61 percent of Facebook users had taken a hiatus for reasons that range from
boredom to too much irrelevant information to Lent.
Overall, though, Facebook's user base is growing,
especially on mobile devices. At last count it had 1.06 billion active monthly accounts.
The number of people who access Facebook
daily is also on the rise.
That said, even the company has
acknowledged that some of its users, especially the younger ones, are migrating
to substitutes, but so far this has not meant an overall decline in user
numbers.
"For example, we believe that
some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and
services such as Instagram," the company said last month in the "risk
factors" of its annual 10-K filing. "In the event that our users
increasingly engage with other products and services, we may experience a
decline in user engagement and our business could be harmed."
Facebook owns Instagram, but so far it has
not shown any ads on it.
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