I knew something was missing from the Facebook homepage for the past few days but not until this morning did I realize what was now absent: highlights. For those unaware of what feed highlights were, they were supposed to be the most relevant stories for a user. I noticed more recently that many of the feed stories weren’t very relevant to me and apparently many other users realized the same thing because now they’re gone.
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Soon after the Facebook platform launched two years ago, developers became familiar with the concept of news feed optimization: modifying news feed stories to increase the likelihood of them appearing. The process for developers to publish feed stories has been modified significantly since then and developers are now welcoming a return to the feeds. While many users are complaining about the proliferation of annoying feed stories from quiz applications, the only person to blame now is a user’s friends.
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Since rolling out the new design last week, many users have noticed that comment box is displayed below feed items by default. It’s a small change but I’ve had a large number of emails and comments related to the topic over the past few days. David Kirkpatrick, author of the book “The Facebook Effect” commented that he believes “it takes up too much space in news feed”.
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One of the most sought after items in Silicon Valley currently is stock shares of Facebook, but potentially more valuable is shares in the Facebook newsfeed. Valleywag’s Owen Thoman even suggests that Facbeook is auctioning off shares in their news feed:
Digg, the popular news-discussion website founded by Web 2.0 playboy Kevin Rose, is rumored to have struck a deal with Facebook that guaranteed a level of News Feed placement before it agreed to sign up with Connect. And app developers are advising other potential Facebook partners to get similar guarantees in writing.
Can Facebook really be offering guaranteed levels of news feed placements? At first glance this seems like a ridiculous notion but considering that most of the agreements have been with other media companies, it makes some sense. Facebook can exchange a minimal level of placement in exchange for a user’s identity. If you aren’t going to get access to a user’s email, you’d probably want some sort of promotional benefit that will substitute what could potentially be a decrease in user marketing potential.
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Currently, Facebook has limited the use of profile feeds by developers to 10 stories per day. Yesterday while testing out a few applications I realized how completely flawed this is. For example, I was using the MTV Music Videos application and realized that everytime I listen to a video, that is an activity that my friends should be notified of.
FriendFeed, the popular activity aggregation tool, makes sure to publish all of your activities and then provides a filter of your network’s activities based on a number of factors. Facebook performs a similar service and when you view your main news feed on the Facebook home page, this is a highly filtered set of news stories. The reason that Facebook limits application feed activity makes sense, they want to filter out application spam.
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Facebook made some minor changes to the homepage last night with one substantial change which is the removal of quick links to Facebook created applications (notes, videos and photos). Now, the status has been promoted to be the primary item within the homepage. This new update clearly marks a shift toward a more Twitter-like environment.
Additionally, statuses are no longer in the sidebar only in the news feed. The majority of the changes are extremely small but the promotion of statuses definitely emphasizes the importance of statuses. Soon enough we will see statuses as the default tab within the news feed. That would actually make a lot of sense considering Facebook’s less than efficient auto-filtering system in the feed.
I’ve noticed that viewing the unfiltered feed provides me with much more valuable information. I’ve spoken with a number of other people who have been dissatisfied with the quality of stories being displayed in the news feed. Have you had any issues with news feed content?
