Facebook gets celebrity-centred makeover

Keeping a track of celebrities and causes just got easier - all thanks to Facebook.

The popular social networking site has made changes to its services, which would soon make it simple to keep track of famous stars.

Facebook has announced that members can view the new home page design from March 11, which include increased friend limit and a rephrasing of the status update question.

The site's 175 million users would be able to follow profile pages of celebrities, organisations and causes while remaining updated about their friends.

'This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe,' Sky News quoted founder Mark Zuckerberg as saying.

'You can decide you no longer want to get updates from your old friend from high school who you rarely talk to, or you can filter the stream to only see updates about your family members,' he added in a blog post.

The development was speculated to be a move made to keep up with rival microblogging site Twitter that boats of various high profile members including US President Barack Obama, singer Lindsay Lohan.

TechCrunch blogger Erick Schonfeld said: 'Facebook is trying to shore itself up as the foundation for a living, rapid-fire web where the line between private messages and public content is blurred,' he wrote.

'Under no circumstances does it want to cede the thought stream of its users to Twitter.'