Today Facebook has announced a redesigned of the News Feed, one of the most crucial aspects of the popular social network. People’s complaints of the feed in the past have been mostly directed at how cluttered it felt, so the new feed was designed to make everything much cleaner looking, but has also added some new features as well.

The redesign takes some design cues from the mobile versions of Facebook, so all versions now have a unified look. The News Ticker that use to sit on the upper right of the screen has now been removed, and the chat functions have been moved to the sidebar on the left. With the freed up real estate now available, pictures, videos and albums are now much larger, giving the feed a much richer feeling to it. Of course, this will also mean that ads will be just as large — but hey, at least they’ll look nicer.

If you look to the right of the image on the spot where the News Ticker used to be, you’ll also notice that Facebook has added a lot more options to what kind of feed you can view. While the option to view Most Recent items is still there, now you can choose to view feeds dedicated to all your friends’ updates, photos (which will also pull photos from the now Facebook-owned Instagram), music, games and people or publications you might follow.

It’s of course designed to keep you on the site longer, but that might not be such a bad thing when the features they’re adding are actually pretty useful for Facebook users anyway. The new design also leaves a lot of white space throughout the page, giving things much more room to breathe and making the site look much easier on the eyes. For a closer look at the redesign and the word from Facebook themselves, check out the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YaQQHYQHnMk

If you’re interested in trying out the new feed right away, Facebook is now slowly rolling out it out to users starting today but you can also sign up for a waiting list right here (you’ll find it on the bottom of the page from the link below.

Facebook News Feed homepage

[via Facebook]