Facebook rolls out revamped news feed

Want to cut down on the dreaded status update chatter? A new Facebook functionality should help.

We've all experienced it – the noise that comes from 400 friends updating their Facebook feeds at the same time. Well, now Facebook has trotted out a new tool which should help us cut back on the chatter. Starting today, users will be able to toggle between "Live Feed" and "News Feed" options.

Think of the "Live Feed" like an open faucet – the status updates come spilling out a billion miles-per-hour. New photos; new observations; new links. Your friend Stan, telling everyone about this fabulous new jar of pickles he recently purchased from the corner grocery.

"News Feed," on the other hand, hands the filtering duties over to Facebook, which automatically separates the wheat from the chaff. "News Feed picks stories that we think you'll enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked and commented on it and how likely you are to interact with that story," Facebook wrote on the company blog.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced it now had 300 million users, a staggering figure that indicates how globally popular the site has become. In a blog post at the time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was looking forward to expanding Facebook’s reach even further. “We’re just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote.

The new filtering option will probably help.

So will the recently rolled out Facebook Lite, a pared-down functionality is aimed at late-adopters and other folks still learning how to navigate the wild world of social networking.

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