Facebook has finally launched the redesigned homepage it has been testing for a while now and it comes with quite a few significant changes. Information overload is a recurring theme these days and for good reason. Getting information has never been easier, but the sheer volume makes it hard to discern the most important piece. Everybody is trying to tackle the problem and Facebook's answer is to change the default News Feed to surface the entries that may be of most use to the users making it easier to keep up.

“[T]oday we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that's happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now,” Facebook's Raylene Yung wrote. “You will be able to catch up on what you may have missed while you were away from Facebook and then easily switch to the real-time stream when you want to see posts as soon as they're shared.”

The biggest change is that to the default view in the News Feed. Stories are no longer chronological, but are sorted by their relevance based on your previous behavior and on who posted them. The way Facebook determines which stories are the most important is similar to the method used for the ill-fated Highlights section in the right sidebar. In fact, the Highlights are now gone with the feature's functionality integrated in the main feed. But the new News Feed view is more than just a relocated Highlights section, it also includes status updates that it also ranks in terms of their importance to you.

The space occupied by the Highlights section is now filled with important event notifications like birthdays. The old chronological News Feed is available in the Live Feed section, but this has seen several changes to make it more real-time. Status updates and other notifications now get refreshed automatically and, once you switch to this view, it will remain the default one for the entire session. Both views now feature a small Publisher with just a text entry box. The changes should be rolled out to all users today.