Blog: will Facebook become the world's homepage

Facebook has unveiled a redesign to the homepages of its 175 million users in an attempt to make the service more up-to-the-minute and to provide a platform for companies and brands.

The new homepage, which will be dominated by a "stream" of updates which can be filtered and organised by the user, will go live from March 11.

The stream service is akin to that of micro-blogging site Twitter which Facebook tried to buy with $500 million of stock last year.

At the launch at the company's headquarters in Palo Alo in California, Mark Zuckerberg said the new home page would let users see what was happening around them in real time. He emphasised that Facebook was giving people much greater control over the stream of updates, something that users had been asking for. Previously the page was refreshed every 10 to 15 minutes - now that will happen instantly, he said.

"As more and more information flows through Facebook, the need for people to easily discover the most recent and relevant content has grown," he said.

The last major redesign of Facebook caused widespread protests. Mr Zuckerberg said that, despite the protests, users liked the change which resulted in more people sharing more information on the site.

This latest change, which would not be the last, was a move in the right direction, he said.

The new homepage will have a status update box now called the "publisher" with the question: "What's on your mind". There, users can post comments, upload pictures or videos, links to stories and so on.

Also on the homepage will be the filter controls so that users can block others, view only certain types of content, for example only photos, or simply restrict the stream of updates to friends and family.

Mr Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook was opening itself up as a platform for companies and public figures to connect with millions of users. The "pages" feature of Facebook, which is used by brands and organisations to have a presence on the site, will become much more like an ordinary person's profile. The cap of 5,000 "friends" per account holder is also being lifted and users will be able to include updates from the new public profiles in their "stream" without having to "friend" them first.

This "follow" feature is one of the reasons behind the success of Twitter. Mr Zuckerberg said he was a fan of Twitter. "We really admire what they are doing."

The change positions Facebook to try to make money with a feature that provides an online platform for people with brands to promote or messages to spread. "There is a philosophical change; we want to converge all these different kinds of people on the website," Mr Zuckerberg said.

Those signed up already for the new public profiles include US President Barack Obama, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Oprah Winfrey and rock bank U2.

"Bono, the New York Times, public figures and more have messages and want their voices heard by their audiences," Mr Zuckerberg said.