First look: New Facebook News Feed

Even Facebook Chat is kind of hidden away if you have it turned off - switch it on, and your available contacts zip into life in the left hand column.

There's been some outcry about the size of ads in the new News Feed - and yeah, they are bigger. But they have to be to fit with your bigger status updates and bigger photo posts and bigger shared links. We didn't see a massive amount of evidence of more sponsored posts, although Facebook did suggest this page to us:

I have no idea what The Croods are or why Facebook thinks I'd like them but it looks like something I'd cross the road to avoid being associated with so Facebook's algorithms may need a bit of work.

Early verdict

Facebook's new News Feed will have some up in arms because change is bad, and it will have others up in arms because ads are annoying and it will have others up in arms because some people just like getting pointlessly annoyed about things.

But give it a few months and we'll all have forgotten what the old News Feed looked like. And what Facebook has built is honestly a nicer environment to peruse: visually calmer and navigationally straightforward.

But it comes at a cost, and that cost is communication. You want to social network? You might be better off on Twitter.

Still, the changes will be great for hardcore 23-hour-a-day Facebook users who don't care about communicating so much as being seen, and will get plenty of use out of all the new filtering options. They're probably the people who'll use Graph Search.

But there are a lot of options we're not sure we'll use all that often because, honestly, the regular news feed ticks all the boxes for most casual Facebookers.