Facebook Needs a Faster Newsfeed
Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 26th, 2008 5:18 PMGary Vaynerchuk makes an amazing point about the Facebook newsfeed. He makes his point in reference to Twitter (something I have become increasingly active on). Twitter is instantaneous and very fast. The Facebook newsfeed on the other hand updates every 15 minutes or so. With that type of delay, a market for a faster newsfeed has opened up and right now both Twitter and FriendFeed is filling that void.
Facebook is starting to face competition (no pun intended) from all sides and they are going to be forced to adapt rapidly as they have in the past. This is not to say that Facebook won’t continue to grow and it doesn’t mean the average Joe understands what Twitter or FriendFeed is. It simply means that these new services have exploited weaknesses in Facebook’s system. Facebook has the upper hand though, all they need to do is adapt.
It makes a lot of sense that Facebook’s newsfeed is slow considering all the data they are processing and filtering through their complex algorithm. As I’ve previously stated on the Social Times, without filtering sites like FriendFeed and Twitter become way too cluttered really fast. As such, it’s necessary to filter. So far Facebook does the most effective job of filtering but perhaps they’ve filtered too much. We want more information about our friends!
So Facebook, turn up the volume and give us more of what we want! We want more news about our friends. We can’t get enough. That’s why people keep coming back to the site in the first place. One simple solution would be to add a link which provides an unfiltered newsfeed. Would you find this useful? How could Facebook improve their newsfeed?
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14 Responses to “Facebook Needs a Faster Newsfeed”
The 50,000 people who read TechCrunch and AllFacebook.com care about the speed of the Facebook news feed. The other 6 billion people in the world don't and will be happy to use Facebook as is.
I have been saying this for months now…hitting refresh all time on my News feed only to get new content every few hours is really starting to get lame.
Maybe there could be an option with a slider bar to set how often content is added…or maybe the number of stories per hour you would like to see. That would be splendid.
The 50,000 people who read TechCrunch and AllFacebook.com care about the speed of the Facebook news feed. The other 6 billion people in the world don’t and will be happy to use Facebook as is.
You sure have changed your tone about the possible benefits of FriendFeed! lol. In seriousness though, the next iteration of profiles allows user to 'approve' what appears in their feed, so I imagine that the ones that ARE approved will have a higher 'value' in the algorithm, and we'll start seeing more entries about what people WANT to show off to their friends.
Which is good.
I have been saying this for months now…hitting refresh all time on my News feed only to get new content every few hours is really starting to get lame.
Maybe there could be an option with a slider bar to set how often content is added…or maybe the number of stories per hour you would like to see. That would be splendid.
I totally concur on the desire to get more info in my news-feed, I often feel like FB is insisting what I want/need to know without letting me easily dive deeper.
I would welcome A “see more news-feed items” link at the bottom of the page, or something along those lines, and imagine I'm not alone in that sentiment…
You sure have changed your tone about the possible benefits of FriendFeed! lol. In seriousness though, the next iteration of profiles allows user to ‘approve’ what appears in their feed, so I imagine that the ones that ARE approved will have a higher ‘value’ in the algorithm, and we’ll start seeing more entries about what people WANT to show off to their friends.
Which is good.
I totally concur on the desire to get more info in my news-feed, I often feel like FB is insisting what I want/need to know without letting me easily dive deeper.
I would welcome A “see more news-feed items” link at the bottom of the page, or something along those lines, and imagine I’m not alone in that sentiment…
@Mike, hmm … don't u think the average person is consuming more content now though? I'm not so sure that they don't want this.
@Mike, hmm … don’t u think the average person is consuming more content now though? I’m not so sure that they don’t want this.
Gary makes a good point, but I really question how much the mainstream audience actually cares about how quick Facebook updates or whether they will gravitate toward the simplicity and relevance that Twitter provides. I think the masses are quite content to simply continue to casually surf their friend's profiles and view their photos, while playing with the occasional app.
Gary makes a good point, but I really question how much the mainstream audience actually cares about how quick Facebook updates or whether they will gravitate toward the simplicity and relevance that Twitter provides. I think the masses are quite content to simply continue to casually surf their friend’s profiles and view their photos, while playing with the occasional app.
Very agree with your idea. With more newsfeed friends can get more and more information. But we need better tools to manage these fast news and give them a better way to show.
Very agree with your idea. With more newsfeed friends can get more and more information. But we need better tools to manage these fast news and give them a better way to show.
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