Your Facebook (F) Newsfeed Is About To Change

Facebook announced on Wednesday that the company will be tweaking the computer software that controls what members see on their feed. It will now favor posts from friends and family more than that of publishers or companies.

It’s about time for such a change. Users of the social networking giant have been complaining that they were scared of missing updates that could be important from the people on their friend’s list.

Facebook’s engineering director Lars Backstrom explained that the change is being made after many users told the company how they felt.

Publishers may not like this new change though. The website is used as one of the main avenues for reading news. The network is even teamed up with the New York Times on its instant articles initiative.

Any publisher that relies on Facebook for having their content appear on the news feeds of users could see a decline in both referral traffic and in readership.

Facebook has reassured that if a publisher’s post is shared by a user, it will get the same treatment as one of their own posts and have a better chance of showing up in that person’s friends’ news feeds.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Cisco Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) and have not been compensated for this article.