I have to say, for all of the shortcomings of Facebook’s news feed / ticker design that I spoke about yesterday, I think the suite of changes they’ve announced today are good.

There has been already so much coverage of what the new features are, so I am not going to highlight them here, but I now get where they are going.

I like the idea of instant personalisation without the need to connect.

I like the idea of the timeline, and the greater detail within it. I like what will appears to be a more intuitive and semantic way of updating it.

I like what they have done with some of their partnerships, particularly with Yahoo.

I really like that they are doing cool stuff with Hulu within Facebook.

I’m not a developer, so the changes to the API are a bit lost on me, but if I were, I imagine I would like that too. Any day now I am expecting a slew of updates for WordPress plugins that leverage these new changes and make experiences better.

These things I like.

I still think the news feed is a mess, and needs work. I think there needs to be a much simpler way for you to determine what you want to see. The ticker on the right of profiles is a mess, because everything is turned ON by default. Unless I can’t see it, the only way to tidy it up is on a per friend basis.

What they have announced today is great. For developers. Which will ultimately make user experience better. What would be great is if they had given the same sort of rationale and context for users on why they changed the news feed.

What I am yet to see in all of this though is the impact on pages. With the changes in how content feeds to news feeds, top stories and the likes, surely it has to impact brand pages. There has been a lot written about optimisation to ensure you show up in the news feed. Will this change? We will see.

PHOTO – dtweney