Facebook rolled out an updated News Feed on Thursday, aiming to provide a “personalized newspaper” featuring updates both from friends and selected news sources.

The new News Feed will be slowly rolled out to users over the next few weeks. (To get it early, you can click this link to join the waiting list.) It steals ideas from Facebook’s mobile apps, which have focused on prominently showcasing photos. To that, Facebook has added a bevy of new feeds, or ways of displaying updates on your page. These include distinct feeds for music, photos, games, updates from “close friends,” and those from people and Pages you follow.

“News Feed is one of the most important services that we’ve built,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at an event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. “It take all the things that your friends are doing and puts them all in one place.”

Facebook has also come under fire for allegedly suppressing content that wasn’t promoted in the News Feed. Earlier this week, Nick Bilton of the New York Times essentially accused Facebook of encouraging a pay-to-play scheme. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban also said he had been encouraged to pay Facebook to increase the number of people who would see his posts.

Facebook denied the charges, saying its algorithms have made recent attempts to focus more on higher-quality stories, and that engagement was actually up for social media figures with more than 10,000 followers.

More to come.

Categorised as: Chief Digital Officer | Digital Media | Feedster

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