The social networking giant, Facebook will announce its first major change to the News Feed in a big press event at its California headquarters Thursday. According to a report, the redesigned News Feed is likely to feature separate feeds for different categories such as news, pictures and music.

The announcement of the new design for News Feed came hardly after a month it announced the new Graph Search. The redesigned News Feed is more likely to be attractive for advertisers.

 "It's a direct shot across the bow at Google,"  The Star has quoted IDC analyst Kevin Restivo as saying, "Those two companies are mortal enemies and this just brings them into greater competition against each other. The battleground is the advertising field."

According to a TechCrunch report, in addition to the separate feed for different categories, the social networking site will also feature larger photos and image-based ads on the News Feed.

"As our news feed design evolves to show richer kinds of stories, that opens up new opportunities to offer different kinds of ads as well...One of the product design principles that we've always had is we want the organic content to be of the same basic types of formats as paid content, right? So, historically, advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos and we haven't provided those things historically," Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook said in company's fourth-quarter earnings.

"But, one of the things that we've done in the last year is you've seen the organic news feed product that consumers use moving towards bigger pictures, richer media and I think you'll continue to see it go in that direction. And, I think that a lot of the success of products like Instagram is because of that. It's a very immersive - even on a small screen, just - it's a wonderful photo product," he added.

Sidneyeve Matrix, a social media expert from Queen's University said that eventually, content based News Feed would keep users coming back to Facebook, which would also help to drive advertisers' interest.

Overall, with the launch of retooled News Feed, user will have more control over what content to see and will find out new ways to interact with friends and also to search particular type of media that one is interested in. It is still unclear whether the Facebook mobile app will also feature the new changes. 

To report problems or to leave feedback about this article, e-mail:

To contact the editor, e-mail: