Since the F8 Developers Conference in September, where Mark Zuckerberg announced major design updates to the Facebook platform, the way I participate on the popular social network has changed. While the main headlines coming out of F8 focused on a significant overhaul for the profile format called Timeline, the most significant improvement involved the Facebook News Feed. These changes to the News Feed have slowly caused me to leave my Facebook friends behind. And I don’t really miss them.
The new algorithm powering the main Facebook News Feed displays curated “top stories,” along with an exhaustive raw feed that streams real-time activity from everyone in your network. Mark Tonkelowitz, in a post on the Facebook blog, wrote that they intended the updated News Feed to “act more like your own personal newspaper.” It would use its algorithm, largely driven by engagement, to select the top updates to showcase on your home page. It wasn’t a significant change from the previous iteration of the News Feed; most of the criticism was directed at the ticker, particularly due to the “frictionless sharing” that allows your friends to see the articles you read in the Washington Post and the songs you’re listening to in Spotify. But the long term play is in the main News Feed and the top stories.
Facebook now allows for several types of relationships, and hidden in the News Feed are new customization options. Not only do you have “Friends” and can “Like” pages on Facebook, but you can now “Subscribe” to someone’s updates, similar to how you follow someone on Twitter. I was excited to be able to get Facebook updates from internet figures like Bill Simmons, Brian Stelter, and Sheryl Sandberg for the first time. However, what may be just as significant as subscribing to someone’s updates, is the ability to unsubscribe.
You’ve long been able to “mute” friends from your Facebook news feed (a feature I utilized liberally), and many of us have wrestled with the decision of whether or not to “unfriend” someone on Facebook who really isn’t a friend. Facebook now offers a third, friendlier layer – the ability to unsubscribe, or only get that person’s “most important” updates. The ability to unsubscribe, and subsequently curate my News Feed content, is my favorite Facebook feature since the Like.
Initially, most of my “top stories” were photos of babies and engagement announcements, as Facebook updates are wont to be. Truthfully, many of my best (and most interesting) friends are still reluctant to post Facebook statuses and save their best jokes for Twitter, which makes updates from Facebook friends really more like updates from acquaintances. But with the options now available in the News Feed, I have more control over the content I’d like prioritized.
On Twitter, if you follow someone, you get every single one of their updates. This can be manageable if you follow 50 or 100 people, but once you get into several hundred (or thousand), the firehose becomes hard to manage. But our Facebook relationships are different than the ones we have with our Twitter followers. If I want to unfollow @TheRock on Twitter, I can just do it. (I would never do that.) However, if I’m tired of reading my mom’s status updates on Facebook, I can’t unfriend her – that’s an internet faux pas. (I would never do that either.) Now, guilt-free, I can unsubscribe or only subscribe to a person’s “most important” updates, something I’ve done with more of my friends than I’d like to admit.
Since I began unsubscribing from my friends, a good chunk of the updates I receive on Facebook are – wait for it – news. I’ve “liked” more pages (largely news outlets, blogs, and brands) in the last three months than I have in the seven years I’ve been on Facebook. The combination of Gawker’s nine Facebook pages have brought me more amusement in my news feed than any nine friends on Facebook have in a very, very long time. I’ve even began moving away from Twitter as a news platform. While still great for getting a quick temperature check on the news cycle and trading jokes with your friends, Facebook lets the cream rise to the top, organizing updates in order of importance and relevance. These subtle changes mean everything in the fight for social news curation. Facebook will continue to sit in the throne of platform dominance – though, potentially at the cost of the foundation of friends on which it was built.
What do you think? Has the new News Feed changed the way you use Facebook?