Don't like what Facebook is choosing to show you in your N ews Feed? A video-, picture-, and music-packed redesign lets you sift through it all yourself.
Facebook is letting users sort the “news” in its News Feed. A redesign lets them organize their primary scroll of information by photos, games, music, and other categories.
“What we’re trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained during a press event at the company's headquarters on Thursday.
A new "Switcher" feature flips through the social network’s metaphorical newspaper sections. In the process, it could help ease criticism about how the site decides which stories own the valuable real estate on its homepage.
Since becoming a public company last year, Facebook has been dancing between pressure to ramp up advertising and risk of alienating users in the process. Its mobile revenue has zoomed from bare existence to about 23% of its advertising business in less than a year. But some have worried new advertising features such as sponsored stories and promoted posts are making the network less valuable for those who don't pay to play. In response to recent criticism accusing the social network of suppressing normal posts in order to make way for their paid counterparts, Facebook insisted that its algorithms weren’t discriminating against good old unpaid activity.
But a better response to the conflict is a feature that lets users choose for themselves what kind of updates they see in the News Feed. Facebook might not mention it, but the Switcher is a beautiful distraction for critics of Edge Rank, Facebook's secret and proprietary algorithm that decides what items show up in your News Feed.
About to complain that Facebook's constant algorithm tweaks mean you're missing updates from friends? There's a "recent" option that includes everything. Feeling overrun by brand pages you really just "Liked" for the coupons? A “friends” option in the switcher removes updates from pages and people who a user follows in order “to make sure I'm not missing anything my friends are doing on Facebook,” Chris Struhar, the tech lead of Facebook's News Feed, said during Thursday's presentation. Meanwhile, a “following” feed provides updates from pages and people who you follow. In that mode, Struhar explains, “We're putting it in chronological order to make sure content publishers know that their fans can see every single post that they make.”
When everyone has their own corner of the playground, it's hard to argue about who's controlling the main sandbox.
Of course, Facebook didn’t mention how it will integrate ads or sponsored stories within its new News Feed layout. A richer, mobile-inspired design that takes up more space Facebook's homepage is a fertile ground for advertising revenue. Sticking paid brand updates in the "friends" feed, however, would effectively defeat its purpose.
Intentional or not, it's an answer to critics of EdgeRank, Facebook's proprietary algorithm that decides which updates you see in your feed. The redesign gives users the choice to see everything and sort through it themselves, a behavior that becomes increasingly unlikely as the number of people and brands you follow grows--Facebook knows this. That's part of why they have EdgeRank. So as beautiful as it is, the kitchen sink approach to a redesign doesn't solve an EdgeRank problem.
Source : fastcompany[dot]com
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