AdExchanger: News and Views on Data-Driven Digital Advertising

Spring has nearly sprung, and it seems Facebook is ready to get the clutter out.

The company today rolled out organized, parallel newsfeeds geared to various user information needs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several members of his team showed off the new, more visually dynamic newsfeeds at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters this morning.

The quick take for advertisers: Paid placements are likely to be larger and more engaging, but the full impact is still unclear.

Currently, Facebook users are slaves to a singular, often crowded feed that offers little organization other than by chronology and most active stories. “The history of Newsfeed is to have a single stream of content,” Zuckerberg pointed out. “But we have been trying to build the most personalized newspaper we can.

The result is a variety of newsfeeds that were guided and inspired by special constraints the company faced in developing mobile versions of its user interface. Those newsfeeds are:  All Friends, Photos, Music, and Following. This means users can allot time to things that interests them most.

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With the Beta launch of Graph Search today, Facebook aims to let users search through all their friends’ data in one place -- rather than having to hop from profile to profile, page to page. CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes the initiative as a third pillar alongside its other core social products, Newsfeed and Timeline.

“Graph search is the kind of product we love to build at Facebook,” Zuckerberg said today during the announcement event at the company's Menlo Park headquarters. “Since every piece of content has its own audience, we have created a way to access that.”

While there is no immediate impact to how ad space is organized or sold, Facebook said businesses should be aware of how crucial the information on their Pages is and that they are accurately tagged and organized so they show up in these new searches. And down the line, as the product enters general release, one can imagine a future where Facebook allows advertisers to leverage commercial intent expressed through their Graph Search queries to deliver more targeted ads.

Zuckerberg and the two former Google executives heading this new service (Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen) argued there is great potential for the social graph to benefit businesses and advertisers, but said the focus now is on the user experience.

With 1 billion people, more than 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections currently on the site, executives said it has taken Facebook more than a year to create the right search functionality and filtering system to work within the privacy settings on the platform.

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