Facebook Teams Up With 18 Mobile Carriers To Offer Discounted Messaging In 14 Countries
Facebook partner with the New York Times, BuzzFeed and other news organizations to host content within site. Reuters

Editor's Note: We'll be featuring live updates on our page as Facebook continues to stream its event from Menlo Park, Calif.

Facebook is introducing new features to its News Feed on its desktop and mobile interfaces on Thursday, including a brand-new design, a new system for promoting content you might like, and giving links, photos and videos more space “to shine,” Julie Zhuo, Facebook’s director of design, said.

The Facebook event, which began at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST), is being shown online via LiveStream.com. To watch the live stream of Facebook’s News Feed event, visit LiveStream or simply watch the video right here on this page.

“News Feed is one of the most important services that we build," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who opened Thursday's event. "It takes all of the things your friends are doing and puts it all in one place.”

Zuckerberg said that the News Feed has grown into a source of visual content for people: Photos now dominate the News Feed, supplying rougly 50 percent of its total content.

The redesigned News Feed eliminates the left-hand column on the desktop, and replaces the space with rich feeds that display content more prominently.

The new News Feed is also much smarter than before: According to Zhuo, the News Feed can detect if many of your friends are sharing the same content, and will bring it to the forefront -- you'll also easily be able to see who has shared the content, with pictures of your friends' faces. If you hover over their profile pictures, you can see what they said about the content they shared.

The new Facebook News Feed also allows people to have greater control over the stories they see on their homepage.

"Sometimes you want to see every event that my friends are going to," Chris Struhar, the tech lead at Facebook, said. "Or every photo my friends are uploading. Or all the music my friends are listening to… Now you have more control over which of these feeds you see on your homepage … You can jump to any one of these feeds using the switcher at the top right of the page.”