Originally posted on the On Ideas Blog
With Facebook set to begin trading publicly on the stock market this week at somewhere between $34-38 per share, a lot of talk has been going around about if they’ll be able to sustain the traffic and momentum necessary to support such a large public offering.
Followed up with reports that GM is pulling $10 Million in Facebook ads, and a new report that says “half of Americans think Social Media is a Fad,” if you were Mark Zuckerberg (or his hoodie) you too would be trying to figure out new ways to keep users engaged.
If you check out your personal Facebook page lately, you may have seen quite a few changes. Besides the obvious change to timeline, Facebook has been experimenting with a number of new features designed to make your sharing more intuitive and more personal.
Look at your friend list now, it not only shows their profile photo, but their name as well.
The activity feed, which has always been a personal point of contention against the new Facebook Timeline, is now cleaned up, more streamlined, and truly showcases the activity online.
If you look, the new stream pulls everything from new page likes to foursquare badge checkins to Instagram photos and even activity from new Spotify apps into a compact window with a sample of the content.
I think this is a HUGE upgrade for the user experience, and will allow more content from apps and 3rd party sites using Facebook Connect to be seen.
What do you think about the new change to the Facebook activity stream? Let us know in the comments below!