Facebook launches "News Feed" and "Mini Feed" — as YouTube invades turf
Facebook has just made two big changes. Facebook’s Ruchi Sanghvi has blogged about it here.
First, Facebook has released “News Feed,” a feature that that appears on your homepage to let you know what is happening in your social circles. It pulls in the latest information about your friends or other contacts, notifying you for example when your secret crush breaks up and becomes available for dating again.
Second, it has released “Mini-Feed,” which appears in each person’s profile. This is for when you visit other peoples’ pages, and just want to know what they have changed recently (notes, photos, etc). As opposed to “News Feed” which is pulled into your page, “Mini-Feed” resides only on the pages of each individual member. You can remove the updates, if you don’t like them.
These features seem to be pretty useful, but they are really only update mechanisms. They seem consistent with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s penchant to restrain members’ freedom on how their profiles look (which, btw, can be a good thing, if you consider the ugly, unreadable MySpace pages you see sometimes).
It is noteworthy that Facebook still does not allow things like video-sharing.
YouTube recently added YouTube Colleges, a video-sharing feature for use only from within specific colleges.
Update: The Facebook feature has been heavily criticized.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
