New navigation for users and 400 million active users announcement

February 4, 2010

At Facebook, our mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Our home page is an integral place users go to discover and consume information about what is going on around them. We want to ensure we are surfacing the things that are important to our users and make access more intuitive. Over the past few months, we have been testing different designs focused on removing navigational redundancies and consolidating notifications. Today, we're launching the updated home page to a portion of our users with the intention to roll it out to everyone soon. In doing so, we hope to make it as easy as possible for our more than 400 million users worldwide (!) to find what they are looking for and engage with the content most relevant to them - whether it's their notifications, friend requests, personal messages or applications.

The new design offers more intuitive navigation from the home page to commonly used areas of the site: Messages, Friends, Photos, Events, Applications and Games. Each section will be a dashboard of activity - essentially a digest of the most important information and updates for each user. The layout of these pages is slightly different from other pages on the site. This layout will allow Facebook Ads to be displayed in a wider format. Please make note though, this ad format does not require additional creative optimizations since the ad submission specifications remain the same. You don't need to make any changes to your ads. As always, for every ad on Facebook, you submit 25 characters for your ad title, 135 characters for your ad body text and an optimal image of up to 110 x 80 pixels. Your ads and the images in your ads will continue to be automatically formatted to fit the appropriate specifications wherever it displays on the site. The image in the ads that are displayed on these pages is slightly smaller to better fit the new format. There are no changes to your stats in the Ads Manager. Whether an impression is delivered on these newly designed pages or on another page, your total impressions and clicks will be inclusive across the site.

We will be testing and iterating in the coming weeks to ensure we are optimizing for the most success. As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback.