Facebook will unveil a newly designed version of its News Feed feature Thursday March 7 at 10 a.m. PT in Menlo Park, California.
The company released an invitation image as a way of announcing the new design. Featuring the Facebook logo, the image simply states, "Come see a new look for News Feed." The date, time and location of the event are also listed.
News Feed is a key feature of the site that displays a constantly updating stream of friends' photos, video and comments. CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls it one of the three "pillars" of the site, alongside the search feature and profiles. It is not known what the new design will entail. It's possible that it will more closely integrate Graph Search, a tool that lets users search through their friends' information.
Facebook hasn't worked too much recently on News Feed and its last major update to the feature was in September 2011. Instead, the company has opted to focus on things like Timeline, for which it has been testing new designs. It has also been concentrating heavily on its mobile presence, given the fact that most daily users now access the site on mobile devices rather than desktops. The move could also be a response to the fact that the mobile of version of Facebook has less features than the PC version.
"Maybe this is a way to bring some of that together," says industry research firm Gartner analyst Brian Blau.
On Thursday Feb. 28 Facebook announced it will be acquiring the Microsoft ad server Atlas in a move to provide marketers and advertisers with better tools to manage and track their ads on the website. The March 7 event likely won't concern Atlas, although Zuckerberg may mention it during his speech.
Facebook shares were up almost two percent to $27.22 in midday trading on Friday.
