Facebook's New NewsFeed: A Big Shot Fired in The War Against Information Overload
Facebook just made one of the biggest changes to the site's user experience since the introduction of the News Feed three years ago. News Feed was the place in the very center of the site where all the activities of a user's friends were displayed in reverse chronological order. That feature is now called the Live Feed and the News Feed has become a filtered display of activity highlights instead.
In September 2006 the News Feed was a radical idea; thousands of Facebook users revolted against the idea that all their friends would be shown every photo they uploaded, when their relationship status changed and other information as soon as it was available. Today we live in a different world. Almost everything is social and the new challenge is tackling information overload. That's what Facebook just did today and it's going to be very important for the future.
Everyone's trying to solve this problem. There are inbox filtering services like ReMail, Threadsy and the experimental new Mozilla Raindrop. There are column filters in stream readers like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Google Reader yesterday introduced a "magic" filter view for the most popular items across the whole network. FriendFeed, a small but innovative social aggregator started by one of the creators of GMail and acquired by Facebook for $50 million this summer, offers a "best of day" view of any stream of updates you're looking at.
That FriendFeed view is the closest thing to the new Facebook News Feed, but a Facebook spokesperson told us that the two products are unrelated.
Everyone's trying to tackle information overload. Step one, get more people sharing information. Step two, figure out how to create a personalized, high-value view of all that information by surfacing the most important updates for each user. Step three, profit!
How It Works
The new News Feed view is based on an algorithm that scores every update coming in through what's now called the Live Feed. That scoring is based on the number of "likes" and comments an item has received and how much you personally have interacted with the update's author in the past.
A related algorithm was used in the past to create the "highlights" section on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. That section was getting too little interaction and didn't include things like important status updates, the company says. If your sister posted a status update saying that she's pregnant, a Facebook spokesperson told us today, that wouldn't show up in the old highlights view. It should show up in your News Feed now.
So three big changes: 1. The new Live Feed is linked-to at the top of the page and shows a number of new items since your last visit. 2. Highlights plus hot status updates are now the default, the new News Feed. 3. Birthdays and other important events have taken the place of the old Highlights section; they are of particular interest to users and will now be easier to see.
What It Means
Facebook says that after viewing your new News Feed, you can go check out the raw Live Stream of all the most recent updates from your contacts. That's the opposite of the way FriendFeed did it and neither strategy should be taken for granted. Decisions like this impact a major method of communication for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
By showing the News Feed highlights as the default view, Facebook will probably encourage users to pay more attention to, interact with more and grow closer to the people they already have a history of interacting with and the events that are already popular. Weak social connections and your personal long-tail of content are less prioritized in this view.
The inclusion of a user's past behavior as a criteria for hotness is key, though. It's not just a popularity contest. Your News Feed is your little universe and popularity is defined in relative terms.
That, again, is a particular strategy. The new Google Reader Popular View, for example, appears to evaluate popularity across all users in total.
What It Could Mean In the Future
Someday social networking is going to be like the telephone. Today you can't send messages from Facebook to people on MySpace or LinkedIn but that isn't going to last forever. Just as you can call someone who uses T-Mobile from your Sprint phone, someday sharing and messaging between online social networks will be a given.
How will social networks retain users then? Why stick with Facebook when some smaller service offers a decentralized social networking service outside of Facebook's control but still tied into your friends on Facebook and elsewhere?
These services will someday have to compete on user experience, when they no longer have your social connections locked-in. The service that does the best job filtering up the most important information you have coming your way will likely be the service you stick with. That's going to be a key area of competition between social networks.
How well will Facebook do at filtering the Live Stream of content? We're about to find out and it's going to make a big difference in how we experience the web. That will only be more true as more and more people begin publishing content.
There's been a lot of emphasis on the live stream of real-time web content, but Facebook now joins many other services in recognizing that the best value is sometimes built by combining real time and slower assets.
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very informative post.
I am happy to see the change, as it moves social networking closer to the future interconnection of sites you've discussed.
Some grousing can be anticipated though, as human nature kicks in for those of us who are strict creatures of habit and hate to leave our comfort zones.
For many, ANY change brings on a OMG moment. :-)
I applaud Facebook for attempting to tackle the monumental problem of context, but that's just it, context implies a *reduction* in complexity, *understanding, *meaning*...
"...FriendFeed view is the new Facebook News Feed, but the new Live Feed is linked to Highlights, plus hot status updates are now the default new News Feed, but other events have taken the place of the old Highlights section..."
Good grief.
They seriously expect non-geeks to understand, and make use of, the above nomenclature nightmare?
It's a bad sign if just your terms describing a reduction in complexity are THAT complicated.
My first reaction this morning is, oh crap my facebook feed is screwed up and posting old stuff I'm no longer interested in...
My second reaction, oh... actually it looks like they finally set up the Friend Feed algorithm that Marshall told me about when Facebook bought Friend feed.
My third reaction was, hey look Marshall thinks the new Facebook changes are bigger than they really are.
My fourth reaction: I wish all my myspace / twitter friends could be converted to Facebook users, cuz there's no way I'm into looking at all the other streams on all my other networks as much as I look at Facebook.
Now that would be a big and meaningful change! And I bet you Google or Bing does it before Facebook does it!
Peace!
You did an excellent job of explaining this new Facebook feature as usual. I wish the graphic at the end was explained a bit more. Interesting move by Facebook.
Thanks John. That final image is from our forthcoming report on the Real-Time Web, available for pre-order via the badge near bottom of the post. I just thought it was relevant and so I put it in there. Looks pretty nice, doesn't it?
I guess I'm going to have to give the News Feed time to learn my Facebook usage habits.
The first time I encountered the News Feed today, it promoted 3-day-old updates from friends I rarely interact with to the top. When it updated about 30 minutes later, it showed 4-day-old updates from friends I interact with even less.
A few hours later it's showing some semi-relevant things from a few friends, but they're all updates I caught in the Live Feed a few hours/days earlier.
News Feed doesn't really seem to be geared towards people who tend to use Facebook as a live communication tool -- or who use it to get relatively fresh information from friends. I can perhaps see it as being useful if you've been out of the Facebook loop for a few days/weeks and need some edited highlights in order to play catch up. But for me, at least at the moment, News Feed is more of a "hey, here's some updates you've already seen" kind of deal.
I'm also getting reports from friends who rely on mobile Facebook that they're only seeing the News Feed and have no access to the Live Feed. That's a pretty major oversight.
I am actually very excited for this update. I really did not enjoy logging on to see people I didn't care about's status updates. Boring! It is so weird how much Facebook has changed recently. You know I watched a youtube video today saying how long it took the radio, television, the internet, etc. to gain 1 million viewers/listeners/readers, and it was always like 3+ years. Facebook got 100 mill in 9 months. Wow!
i hate it, the old one was fine,but they should at least put a toggle button to switch back and forth between them because i know some people like it.
Hey Marshall,
For the users that prefer live feed, Facebook allows you to set either as your default. Whichever feed you were using last will be displayed when you log in to your account.
In the past, Facebook has been focused on creating a standard for users, so it's good to see they left the live feed in there for people who spend way to much time on Facebook and want fast, fresh content (namely, nerds like me).
There's also a huge impact for pages as stories like "Marshall Kirkpatrick just became a fan of Involver" are now able to show in the main feed again, the converse effect is that if your post quality score is pretty low, your updates are far less likely to push into the main newsfeed. We're writing something about this today so that we can email our fan-page owners and let them know how best to thrive with the new changes.
Hm, not sure how I feel about this.
After all, wasn't the point of setting up friend groups so that you can filter your news feed EXACTLY how you want it? And if you want to see everyone's updates you look at the main News feed.
So why is Facebook trying to filter things for me that i have already filtered for myself? It seems redundant and in fact I probably will continue to use the 'live' feed to check out a broad range of updates and my friend groups to see more focused stuff, so I'll be cutting out the new News feed.
There are plenty of interesting posts that I enjoy seeing that I just don't bother to interact with in any way, and interaction seems to determine how FB will filter my News feed.
As Marshall states "Weak social connections and your personal long-tail of content are less prioritized in this view." Well I actually LIKE to see what my 'weak' social connections and long tailers are doing. In fact that happens to be one way to stay connected with those folks - through occasional interaction and knowing what's going on in their world. That's one of the advantages of FB for me personally.
Lucy, I agree.
New facebook sucks, end of story. Why fix something that wasn't broke.
The only thing that facebook could have used was more user control over friends posting comments or tagging pics of you.
Let me approve a comment on my status or somebody tagging me in pics, instead of automatically allowing them.
I agree with Lucy. I am more likely to know basic updates about my more interactive friends because I will see them more. The passive information transfer has more value to me with people I don't interact with as much.
I don't like it, but only because it's very glitchy. News and Live feed won't even show up for me. Can't view any profiles. Even after clearing my cache, updating my browser and loads of stuff.
What would be awesome? Hmmm. Maybe if Facebook would communicate about this stuff directly instead of making me search the web for wha the heck just happened. Facebook is very heavy-handed and it will come back to bite them some day.
Having said that, I had a conversation with someone this summer about how Facebook needed to change so that the people I intereact with the most are somehow given priority in my crazy long feed which on a busy day may only contain the last hour's worth of posts on the first page. And so they have done just this. But without telling anyone. Smart jerks.
All you have to do is click on the share button at the bottom of this post to get a sense of where we are. There are hundreds of social networks to participate with and at least 10 solid communities that are important. Where does it all end.
Never mind the burden of the receiving end of content what about the delivery. The further development of API's and the willingness of the networks to open their streams leads to one eventual conclusion. The hub in the future is going to be your own dedicated website that will push your content out to the networks and pull in content from your community built through the networks. You will be discovered on Facebook but you will interact through an API tapping directly into your website.
When you make a comment on a post discovered through Facebook you will make a comment on your website through the API. Your API's will validate your FriendFeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, etc., etc. account so you will not need to login everytime you make a comment, post.
You would then manage the relationships of your community from your website where you could read posts, watch movies and buy products from those you relate to the most.
The evolution of social media is developing into a incredibly effective referral machine but trying to manage this on multiple channels is what is going to choke the machine. Using the networks as discovery channels and managing your community, the media you want to watch and the products you want to buy from your own dedicated website is where it is going.
It is where we are headed (albeit very slowly). I hope the new tools and systems help to inspire more productive chatter than what the majority of social media yields but now I might really be dreaming.
new facebook sucks !
Ok there is a problem with facebook but the solution is a total disaster.
Half of what interests me does not appear in the main feed and I a now wasting my times digging everywhere to find it.
Crap, utter crap.
An indistinct reduction of the noise means I don't hear what I want to hear !!!!
I despise the new facebook home page.
When they added the highlights section on the corner of the page, I didn't like that either so guess what? I blocked it. And now I'm forced to see what other people are doing - again - because it seems like that old section has now been integrated into this new abomination.
I don't click "Like" for everything I like in my friends' pages. It seems absurd and seemingly random how certain status messages are shown to me hours later vs. when they actually occurred and I am inundated with "so and so is now friends with so and so" or "friend x is now a fan of event y." Who cares?
I'm sure there will be people who do like seeing the integration of highlights with the news feed but at least include an option that would allow me to choose what I want to see from friends. I can't "Hide" Friend A's activities (friends, fans, etc.) without completely hiding Friend A. I don't want to completely hide the person.
Maybe I'm still wrong in my perception of these recent events; maybe I don't fully understand what has just happened. But correct me if I'm wrong - I thought, as your article said, this was a fight against information overload?
I appreciate the clear explanation. I found this page by simply google-ing "New Facebook." I can't understand why they didn't give us a heads up.
I truly wonder if they would bother going back to the old one...they have usually listened to their users. Yet well, it is free...
I truly dislike it though. It is confusing and clunky and as Lucy noted, I enjoy hearing from my friends that I don't interact with regularly. That was actually what I thought the point of FB was.
I agree with Lucy. I have filtered my news feed myself by creating friend lists, allowing me to focus in on the specific groups of people I want to connect with. I can check either my family's posts or my colleagues' posts or my neighbors' posts, among other lists, by selecting a particular list of friends in the home page. I don't need Facebook to filter for me or negotiate my social life. It feels creepily intrusive.
I think Facebook has to go a long way. On time the News Feed is by far not showing the interesting things. FriendFeed is doing a much better job.
I don't think that items that are liked a lot and get a lot of cemments are imortant for me. Several times a "Good Morning" gets a lot of likes and comments, but is not really interesting for me. And why aren't there things that are not liked and commented interesting? Especially because I seldom like or comment things.
I am having contact with several people on Twitter, by e-mail, SMS, phone or other social networks and not in Facebook, but I am interested in their stream. To be honest, Facebook is mostly the last place I choose to have a conversation. I know that Facebook wants me to shift the conversation to their site. But for that they still have to work on a lot of problems.
I want to choose myself what is imprtant for me. I don't like Facebook to dictate what is worth showing up in my Feed, especially when it seems that they have no idea what I am interested in?
Very good article mate.
Something that you may be very interested in is the Facebook Status Generator, let me know what you think:
http://www.theisbook.com/status-generator/
Looking forward to reading more of your stuff mate.
as felix sez, "I am inundated with "so and so is now friends with so and so" or "friend x is now a fan of event y." Who cares?" they need to program in options that allow users to turn off those particular mindless updates.
I agree with Lucy. I knew my cousin had posted something on my wall since I got an e-mail about it, but when I went to FB--nothing. It wasn't on either feed and I had to go searching for it. I don't interact with her much, but because of that, I really want to know about it when she does write something. I've reconnected with several long-lost cousins and I don't want to have to go searching for what's going on in their lives. Also, like others, I don't click "like" on everything I like and I don't care about who is friends with who.
I actually had trouble understanding the article but reading the comments that followed helped. I know things need to change, but right now not sure how convenient this is. Maybe just need time. The newsfeed seems awfully long with all the extras about who's friends now...maybe that could be at the right where the highlights were or something. I don't miss the highlights because that seemed kind of redundant. If I'm understanding correctly, I agree with the person who said fb couldn't accurately judge what I think is important based on my comments to a person because I still enjoy reading info on people I don't necessarily make comments to. If I don't want to know what's going on with someone, I won't have them on my friends. Thanks for the update and the chance to comment!
I guess we'll really see how it worked out for Facebook after they analyze the possible mass exodus of the millions that just started on FB and are now confused. Remember, there was a huge bail of people over 50yo recently measured.......Time will tell.
I use Facebook on a daily basis to see pictures and videos posted by friends. Now, since the upgrade, I have to scroll through both feeds ( neither one delivering pertinent info....I get the stupid games on both, I get twitter crap on both, I get stuff posted just minutes ago on both....). It is completely nonsensical and frustrating. All I had to do before is look to the right on my ONE feed and there ( all compressed ) were my pictures and videos. The whole thing about non-techies "just not getting this" is a load of bull....as my husband is a computer engineer and a total techie and thinks this upgrade is crap! Get real!
very annoying downgrade in Facebooks useability
I want to turn off ALL these notificitions
"is now friends with"
"likes"
"commented on"
"became a fan of"
"is attending"
"was tagged"
I got back in touch with many friends from high school, college, former places I've lived, etc., thru FB. If I am close with someone, I don't NEED FB to tell me what they're doing. I use it for the people who I don't see that often, to find out what they're doing, and let them know what I'm doing.
I REALLY hate finding out every time a friend of mine makes a new friend who I don't know at all. What a waste of Live Feed space. I guess the best mix would be the current info of Live Feed combined with the ability to easily edit out apps or people ON MY OWN... wait, that's what it was like last week. Doh!
Quote:I want to turn off ALL these notificitions
"is now friends with"
"likes"
"commented on"
"became a fan of"
"is attending"
"was tagged"
I second this. Why can't I choose what is in my main feed? I am only interested in status updates, links and pages. I can't imagine it is too hard to incorporate this freedom of choice. Instead I get forcefed all the bullshit. Not happy about the update, not happy about the style it was made (a notification would have been correct).
I do find it weird that Facebook has not made an option for choosing what types of things you see in your news feed. You are able to choose the friends you see, or don't see. it seems like it would be an easy thing to figure out.
The only thing they would need to do is to add check-boxes to the left column items (News Feed, Pages, Links etc.)
Nice information on the new Facebook update page. In casual conversations among friends, others are starting to shy away from using Facebook exactly because of this data overload. What was once a fun novelty has now become nothing more than a constant stream of data to parse.
I agree with "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I don't like many of the new changes as well but I want to comment on a different aspect of FB policy, structure and programming here. First some context. The Glenn Beck fan page wall is (thankfully) set up so that posts eventually go to electronic oblivion as new posts are added. There's some pretty vehement, inaccurate and dishonest stuff that gets posted over there. I mean yesterday, one guy even made a thinly veiled threat to shoot me. Now, I'm a big boy. I can laugh things off and I don't go about clicking "report" to tattle-tale on anybody. Not even a threat like that. What am I doing there you might ask? I don't like being there. I'm not even American, I'm Canadian. I see it as a venue where I can refute Beck directly to his audience. With an emerging trend of violence evidenced by such things as the murdered census worker in Kentucky, guns at the healthcare debates, guns flying off the shelves; I think there is a necessity present a counter to his propaganda to the people that need to hear and understand the counter-arguments most. If you look at some of the comments there, you could infer that there are thousands of various versions of a David Koresh type "political" beliefs out there and we all saw what happened with that. I consider it a duty of free speech to speak out against such people and a duty to reach out to such people. It's part of the necessary communication, the public dialogue that is the vital lifeblood, necessary condition and indeed the very essence of democracy. They talk of free speech, well Glenn Beck's speech is much "freer" than mine, or theirs, in his capacity and platform of passively reaching millions of people. Now I type slow, even a few paragraphs is a fairly onerous and lengthy so I copy and paste. Other things I might post is few paragraph's from Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution" or a poem or something that, because of character restrictions, requires multiple posts to be complete. Now I don't have all day to argue there. so yeah, I make alot of posts at once. I don't really like being such a kind of a$$ by bombing their forum like that but it is an effective way to push some ignorance and propaganda into electronic oblivion and thereby, to some limited extent, prevent that sort of virus from spreading. Why the multiple warnings that one can bypass by filling out a CAPTCHA recognition? Why is the limit variable with no definite "do not cross" line? Today I had just one more paragraph from Hannah to post, then I was going to go do other stuff. No I'm blocked. Fine. I'm sorry I was "harrassing" people who debate whether POTUS should be assassinated or impeached because he's "Kenyan". ( Yes I've actually seen people discussing that there.) I apologize for "aggravating" people who pray that poor people don't get public option healthcare. (Yes I've seen people post there that they pray that there's no healthcare reform) Ok I'm blocked, I'll leave them alone, at least for a while. So am I blocked for a few hours or a few days? Which is it? My computer was broken for like 2 weeks and I've just got it back so yes, maybe I was a lil over-zealous. Why can't I still comment on friends picures or posts on their personal pages? Why couldn't I just be blocked from groups or fan pages or something? Why have this sort of limitation on the comments on a page that the posts soon are dropped off of anyway? Where's the AI? Or a human moderator/arbiter? Anyhow, if anyone has some empathy for the situation or feels as I do, I'd humbly ask you to go to Beck's FB fan page and post something sensible and intelligent on some subject. Or even just have a look at what's there. It can be disturbing at times. And to think there's half a million fans on that list, how many viewers? how many books sold? I really thinks America ought to be paying more attention to what's being fomented in this milieu. Especially considering the future problems facing America in regards to the economy, oil price and global warming. Beck's laying the ground for anger and violence that could swell amid the effects of such things that are largely out of politicians, or anyone else's control.
Great article folks.
I personally don't like the new feed filters. However, I imagine FB is taking incremental steps toward an unknowable future which they happen to be simultaneously generating in the same breath. All without blacking out, for even a moment. I suppose I'll not agree with many of their decisions along the way, but I think I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and try, personally, to keep my whining to an inaudible hum.
I HATE this news feed. Now, every time I log on to facebook, I have to click on the live feed button to see my content. I have facebook on my phone, so I really don't feel like I'm missing things. Plus, they were already showing popular stuff on the right side (above the birthdays, mind you, so I keep missing my friends' birthdays because I have to scroll down to see them).
This is actually the first thing FB has done that I didn't like, so I guess it's about time.
A great artical.
Thanks to Tyler post 9. for the excellent advice (why couldnt Facebook tell us this, maybe they would rather the majority didnt know for advetising purposes).
Also like eveyone else totally echo Lucy's comments in post 10.
Thanks.
I *HATE* the new newsfeed. The old one was just fine, and they should allow users to opt-in, not force it on people.
I HATE ThIS AND WANT THE OLD ONE BACK!!!!
You can hide the new annoying messages from the feeds. And If you switch to the Live Feed, You just get almost the same old good facebook homepage:
http://weaxdesign.com/blog/2009/10/28/remove-is-attending-became-fan-joined-group-and-now-friends-messages-from-facebook/
i've never used friendfeed. does friendfeed actually show posts in non-chronological order? i like the idea of a filtered news feed, but not when day-old posts are intertwined with 5-minute-old posts...
Good idea.
But the possible problem could be: the Matthew effect. Popular ones get more popular and unpopular ones get even more unpopular. If for some reason, an update doesn't get its initial "likes" to start off, it would sink and will unlikely be seen again.
What Tyler in post 9 said USED to be true. But over the last couple of days, it's been defaulting back to News Feed every time I open Facebook. This would just be a minor annoyance except I have to have left it on Live Feed in order for Facebook mobile to show me the Live Feed on my phone.
Honestly, the News Feed is worthless to me as I don't want to see day old posts first. Most of the time it's posts I've already seen and responded to, and I already keep up with those via email updates, so I don't need to see them again on my main Facebook page. I want to see what the newest, latest updates are. Please give us an option to remove the News Feed altogether or at least a static option to make the Live Feed the default instead of assuming it will remember which option was selected when I close my browser.
could you update this for the new new facebook news feed