PlayStation 4 interface highlights friends’ activities via social feeds Sony video also shows "multiplayer first" downloads, mobile phone integration.

We hardly knew ye. Hello brand new, Facebook-inspired social news feed, which packs a whole lot of social updates right onto your PS4 home screen, as shown in a new Sony video that showed off the system interface for the first time.

A series of large, text-and-graphics-filled blocks running down the screen in a trio of columns lets a PS4 user see things like new games on the PlayStation Store, friends playing new games for the first time, trophies earned recently by your friends, and players that are broadcasting video of their play sessions. The video shows a user diving in to one of the trophy updates and giving it a quick Facebook-style thumbs up before jumping into a game, then watching a gameplay video before switching straight back to the game itself with a tap of the PS button.

Probably the most intriguing new feature shown in the new interface is the option to "download multiplayer mode first" or "download single player mode first" when buying a game like Killzone online. This follows comments from Sony's Mark Cerny about PlayGo, a PS4 feature that lets games be playable even before their data is fully downloaded or installed from a Blu-ray disc.

"The concept is you download just a portion of the overall data and start your play session, and you continue your play session as the rest downloads in the background," Cerny told Gamasutra in April.

The interface video also shows the PS4's integration with mobile phones, allowing a woman to send messages to her gaming friends on the PS4 while waiting for her food in a diner. She's even inspired to start a remote download of Killzone to her own PS4 after she sees video of how much fun her friends are having.

It's a bit unclear thanks to confusing editing, but the video also seems to show an on-screen keyboard being operated by a few quick tilts of the DualShock 4 controller, Wii remote-style, rather than by tapping the analog stick incessantly. The user profile page also now has a "most used languages" row that shows one of the actors as tri-lingual, so... That might be useful for some people.

While it's hard to get a real feel for this new interface in such a quick, hands-off demonstration, the design definitely shows Sony's interface decisions moving away from a pure focus on accessing games and media and toward integrating the activities of your friends and the Internet into the home screen.