Facebook : Best personalized newspaper in the world?

In announcing Facebook’s re-design this week, Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted Facebook to be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.”

“And,” as reported by the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta (@SominiSengupta), “like a newspaper editor, he wants the “front page” of Facebook to be more engaging — in particular on the smaller screens of mobile devices.”

Makes sense. When I heard about Facebook’s redesign giving pictures and visuals a greater profile, I thought of USA Today.

When USA Today was launched by Gannett in 1982, most people, me included, thought it a little crazy. What’s the value of a national newspaper? And what’s with all the color, graphs, and pictures, especially on the front page? It’ll never work.

We were living in a black and white newspaper world in ’82. I don’t recall color in any newspapers. If I had seen color in a paper, I would have viewed it as a “lesser” quality new publication.

Obviously Gannett changed newspaper publishing. Now mobile devices with beautiful displays are taking visual to a new level on the Internet.

Reeders and personalized presenters such as Feedly, Flipboard, and Zite give tremendous weight to visuals in their presentation of content. The content is more attractive with visuals and we’re drawn to that content with accompanying visuals.

As to Facebook being the best personalized newspaper?“

The topic-specific News Feeds could well persuade users to spend more time scrolling through various streams of content.

……

Facebook’s proprietary algorithms, which try to guess what every user will want to see, will continue to filter the items that show up on each person’s main News Feed. And users will be able to drill down into specific topics they are interested in, akin to the sections of a newspaper.

For instance, they can switch over to specialized feeds that are focused on just the music they are interested in, or they can scroll through a feed that consists of posts from the pages of products and people they follow — a bit like Twitter. If they want to see everything that their friends have posted, they can choose to do that, too; those posts will rush down in chronological order, without any filtering by Facebook’s robots.

I am all in on Facebook being critically important to the business development efforts of lawyers and law firms. It’s the largest social network in the world.

With the Facebook re-design taking Facebook to the level of a personalized interactive newspaper Facebook could become more important to your business development efforts. If more people are getting their news from Facebook, your engaging content needs to be shared by others on Facebook.

Wild that Facebook could be a newspaper of the future? Don’t bet against guys like Zuckerberg.

Not to worry if you’re not seeing a Facebook redesign, it’s being rolled out gradually.