Strategic analysis
Facebook is Back, Baby

Last week, Facebook announced the new newsfeed. It's bigger, simpler, and much better. And in this article we are going to explore why that is important.

If you want to know what the newsfeed about, just head over to their info page, and you get a pretty good idea. Or just watch this video:

...or watch the press conference here.

Om Malik wrote:

Am I the only one who feels that Facebook is starting to lose the plot and is acting like a swimmer caught in an undercurrent that is unseen.

He is exactly right. The new design is in many ways a complete reversal of what they have done in the past.

For instance, the main topic of the past was to de-emphasize pages and instead focus on friends and groups. But the new newsfeed is what Facebook calls "Your personal newspapers", highlighting related content from publishers, which is what you will normally find in a news aggregator.

They used to say that the future was about frictionless sharing, but now it's about the complete opposite: curated content.

They used to focus on Facebook apps, but now Facebook apps are almost nowhere to be found.

It used to be about what friends were doing, now it's more like Twitter and G+, which is mostly what friends are sharing.

So Om Malik is spot on. Facebook has no idea what they want to do, but at least they are now moving in the right direction.

Simplicity

The most noticeable new thing about the newsfeed is the simplicity.

This is something we see on many sites these days. It's basically caused by a combination of two trends:

• The trend of social media fatigue
• The trend of abundance

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