Facebook News Feed Service

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A Facebook News Feed Service is a news feed service that ... facebook.



References

2018a

  • https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/solutions/news-feed
    • QUOTE: Our goal with News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you, every time you visit Facebook. Your News Feed is a personalized, ever-changing collection of photos, videos, links, and updates from the friends, family, businesses, and news sources you've connected to on Facebook. …

2018b

  • (Wikipedia, 2018) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Feed Retrieved:2018-12-4.
    • News Feed is a feature of the social network Facebook. The web feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. Using a proprietary method, Facebook selects a handful of updates to show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 2,000 updates they can potentially receive.

      Over two billion people use Facebook every month, making the network's News Feed the most viewed and most influential aspect of the news industry.

2018c

  • (Wikipedia, 2018) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Feed#History Retrieved:2018-12-4.
    • Before 2006, Facebook simply consisted of profiles, requiring the user to visit a profile to see any new posts. On September 6, 2006, Facebook announced a new home page feature called "News Feed". The new layout created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activities. Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused discontent among Facebook users, many of which complained that the feed was too intrusive, detailing every moment with timestamps, and violated their privacy. Some called for a boycott of the company. In response to this dissatisfaction, CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement clarifying that "We didn’t take away any privacy options", and later issued an open letter apologizing for a lack of information on new features and users' controls, writing "We really messed this one up. [...] I'd like to try to correct those errors now." The News Feed has received multiple updates over the years since its original setup. In 2008, Facebook added a feedback button to each story in a user's feed, letting them tell the service about their personal preferences for their feed. However, the feedback button was removed in April, and returned in July, with Facebook reportedly removing the first iteration of the feedback options due to a low impact on user satisfaction compared to other aspects of the algorithm. In March 2009, Facebook rolled out the option to "Like" a page to see updates from it in their feed, gave users customizable filters to determine what friends they wanted to see News Feed updates from, and also added a publishing field at the top of the feed, previously exclusive to user profiles, for easy post creation. The publishing field contained the text "What's on your mind?", a similar but also notably different question from Twitter's “What are you doing right now?" A few weeks later, the company introduced controls to reduce content from app interactions, and enabled the feed to show photos in which friends were tagged. In December 2010, Facebook rolled out a new drop-down button, offering users the ability to view News Feed by categories, including only games, status updates, photos, links, Pages, or specific groups of people. In February 2011, Facebook added News Feed settings to let users specify if they want content from only the people and pages they interact with the most, rather than everyone. In September, Facebook updated the feed to show top stories and most recent stories, rather than relying on a strictly chronological order. Later the same year, it introduced the "ticker", a real-time extension of News Feed, located on the right side of the screen. At the end of the year, news outlets reported that Facebook would starting allowing advertisements through "Sponsored Stories" in News Feed for the first time. Advertisements started rolling out on January 10, 2012, with a "Featured" tag declaring its paid status. Advertisements were expanded to mobile in February 2012. In March 2013, Facebook held a press event to unveil new updates to News Feed, including a more minimalistic design with consistency across both the website and mobile devices, along with a new layout for posts, presenting friends' photos, shared articles, and maps with larger text and images, and brands' logos. New "sub-feeds" show updates in specific areas, such as posts from specific friends or interest updates. However, the initial limited rollout of the new design saw a trend of lower user engagement, prompting the company to stop the rollout. A year later, in March 2014, Facebook once again updated its News Feed, but in response to criticism from users, the company chose to scale back its efforts. While bringing bigger photos that span the width of the feed, font changes, and design tweaks to buttons and icons, the new design removed the drop-down menu, placing relevant entries in a navigation on the left side of the screen while removing some of the sub-feeds. It also simplified the comments system, altered the appearance of profile photos in the feed, and added a search bar at the top of the page. News Feed product manager Greg Marra explained that "People don't like us moving their furniture around, because you break muscle memory", and "Over the last year, we’ve spent a lot of time seeing what people were saying, what was working, what wasn’t working, and we’re rolling out the version that takes all of that feedback into account". In January 2018, following a difficult 2017, marked by accusations of relaying fake news and revelations about groups close to Russia which tried to influence the 2016 US presidential election (see Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections) via advertisements on his service, Mark Zuckerberg announced in his traditional January post: Following surveys of Facebook users, this desire for change will take the form of a reconfiguration of the News Feed algorithms in order to: *Prioritize content of family members and friends (Mark Zuckerberg January 12, Facebook: [1] “The first changes you'll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups”.) *Give priority to news articles from local sources considered more credible These changes are expected to improve “the amount of meaningful content viewed”.

  1. Mark Zuckerberg, [1], Facebook, January 12, 2018