Users of Facebook, the ubiquitous social networking website, were in for a surprise when they logged onto their online accounts last week.

The website modified the format and function of its News Feed, a feature that updates users on activities in their friends’ accounts, among other changes.

According to Facebook’s own statistics, there are more than 800 million people who actively use the site, making it the most popular social networking site online.

One of the features that Facebook debuted on Sept. 20 was the top stories button, which allows users to specify which posts on their New Feeds are most important by clicking on a blue triangle that appears at the upper left corner of posts. Once a user flags a post in this manner, Facebook adds additional posts that are similar to the marked one. These posts are displayed at the top of the News Feed, though users can scroll down the page to see other recent posts.

Facebook has also added subscription lists that allows users to categorize friends into groups such as “close friends,” “family,” listed school and listed location. These subscription lists essentially function as filtered News Feeds. Users can add friends to a list, which divides their general News Feed into specified categories.

Facebook has also placed a news ticker on the News Feed that alerts users in real time when their friends do something like post a message, comment on a picture or tag a friend in a picture.

These alterations to the site are precursors for the Facebook Timeline, a project that Facebook is presently offering as an option to users, but which will likely soon become the default setting for all users, according to a report from CNN.

The Timeline will reformat the Facebook profile to track events from users’ entire lives chronologically. Users will be able to fix how large they want life events shown in their Timeline, making the events larger if they are important or smaller if they are insignificant or embarrassing.

Facebook is advertising Timeline as “wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual.”

Brittany Andersen, a junior majoring in biology, described the changes as largely “annoying.”

Some students saw other downsides to the changes.

“I think that [the change] takes the adventure out of creeping,” said freshman Amanda Glodowski.

Eric Chow, also a freshman, said he believes Facebook implemented these new features in response to competition from other social networking sites. He said Facebook is attempting to incorporate features similar to those of Twitter and of Google Plus.

“People are complaining about the changes, but they will get over them like all the other Facebook features that sprang up and were eventually accepted by users,” he said. “All the main functions that Facebook users love are still there, so it’s not really a dramatic change.”

As Facebook increases the means and speed at which users’ information is shared online, the company that owns the website has said it is creating more privacy measures and controls to allow users to specify what they do and do not want to share.

By clicking on “Status Update,” users can open a text box that displays a gear wheel button at its bottom, which they may use to select the audience of a post.

Users can make posts viewable to “friends,” “friends of friends,” the separate subscription lists and “custom.” The custom function, which can be accessed by clicking on “privacy settings,” allows users to block posts from specific friends. They can also make photos private by selecting “remove picture from profile.”

Though the picture is removed, the user remains tagged and still receives notifications if anyone posts a comment on it.