Facebook has been making some subtle changes recently, and although that may produce a knee-jerk “again?!” from some people, these relatively minor changes look like they will actually improve user experience somewhat.

The News Feed has changed once more, now incorporating more traditional news, instead of just status updates from friends ands liked pages.  Current events and related articles of a higher quality will become more prominent on users News Feeds, as well as occasionally returning with friend’s comments highlighted.  According to the Facebook Newsroom:

“The goal of News Feed is to show the right content to the right people at the right time whether it's from a close friend or a news source halfway across the world. In the last year, more people found news on Facebook than ever before. In fact, as reported in October, average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170% – almost tripled – in the past year”

Most social media changes these days is just one platform borrowing from another, but that’s not a bad thing.  For example, hashtags, initially introduced by Twitter, were adopted by Facebook to help improve searches and organization.  Now Facebook is borrowing from work-oriented professional networks like LinkedIn and changing the ‘work’ section on profiles, allowing users to put up a ‘I don’t have a job right now’.  This seems like a very small addition, but in theory it could be the start of people finding jobs through Facebook, or being noticed by potential employers.

Lastly, again taking a cue from Twitter, Facebook has plans to implement an ‘unfollow’ button, which will replace the ‘hide all’ option.  This option (especially nice if you have some particularly industrious posters on your friends list) has been around for a while, but the name change from ‘hide all’ to ‘unfollow’ appears to be the result of Facebook's interest in the current social media trend of cross-platform unity.