

Facebook’s news feed: The beginning of a recommendations dominated web - wheels
http://blog.directededge.com/2009/10/23/facebooks-news-feed-the-beginning-of-a-recommendations-dominated-web/

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mleonhard
I think they're working on the assumption that everyone likes the same kinds
of news items as their Facebook friends. I don't think that's really true.

I think this will change the atmosphere of the site. Currently the news items
are mostly about things going on in friends' lives. So when you "like" an item
or comment on it, you're expressing an interest in that person. If Facebook
gets cluttered up with news articles and videos, the metrics available to
Facebook will also become cluttered. I'm afraid Facebook will start showing me
technology stories submitted by classmates and stop showing me what's
happening in my siblings' lives.

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wheels
In my opinion, that's essentially a ranking problem, not a conceptual block.
There's no doubt a wide-open field of "how to get recommendations right" once
things have moved over in that direction. One of the key ways of doing that
will be figuring out how to weigh different sorts of interactions -- it won't
just be so-and-so-likes-this, but also taking into account profile views,
messages sent and so on.

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ErrantX
Oh... I see.

It confused me for a second whya 22 hour old post was top of my home page with
other randomly ordered stuff below it.

I dont think they have their algorithms right to be perfeclty honest;
currently top of my list is a popular status update (4 likes, 9 replies) from
a person I barely know and with whom I have no (Facebook) friends in common.

Hmmm.

Anyone figured out a way to set it to Live Feed by default again?

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sgman
Click the "View Live Feed" link at the top. This is sticky (i.e. will cause
the Live Feed to show up by default the next time you log in).

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axod
FWIW I don't like the new feed (yet). I don't think removing items is a good
way to go about this. Certainly make the UI such that recommeneded items are
more obvious, maybe roll-up the 'boring' items in the timeline, but don't
remove them all together :/

Also at the moment it's just confusing, since the news feed isn't ordered
chronologically. I assume it's ordered in a reddit/HN type way, but that's
certainly not obvious.

Maybe I'll get used to it idk. At the moment it seems quite random.

I think they need a method to feedback also - upmod/downmod - show me
more/less of these types of updates/from this person.

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matthew-wegner
I think many people prefer this pattern of news discovery already. Here I am
on HN reading this article because a bunch of people have upvoted--recommended
--it for me...

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snprbob86
Up-votes and five star scales are just early experiments in recommendations.
"Also bought" is an even earlier one. It clearly works in silos (Reddit,
Netflix, Amazon) and, perhaps covertly, on the open web (Page Rank,
personalized search), but there is still a lot more research to be done. I'm
excited about it :-)

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ja27
It works here and on Amazon, etc. because there is so much noise that most
people only want to see the highlights. On Facebook, most people want to see
every update from the friends (except all the junk apps like Farmville). I'd
rather have a feed that shows me everything except stuff that's been downvoted
by people picking "hide this".

~~~
wheels
I have my Facebook statuses feed piped to RSS and then filtering out the
people that write the most useless stuff. That folder in my mail client
currently has 1347 unread statuses, and that's just since the last time I
marked "set all as read" a couple months back. I seriously question if people
want to see _everything_. And I have a lowly 115 friends. Now take into
account that more and more data is being pushed through that channel and I
_think_ it becomes obvious that eventually "show me everything" becomes
virtually useless at some point in the future.

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sgibat
This isn't new at all. They're just bringing it back. Facebook used to be
entirely like this, with popular items reappearing in the news feed, before
the switch to the strictly chronological stream of updates. Am I wrong?

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Anon84
This actually has some interesting implications for Facebook in terms of
performance requirements. Since they show you "popular" or "well liked" posts
there is no need to constantly update the stream which in turn allows them to
be a bit lazier on synchronizing servers and propagating new posts.

I wouldn't be surprised if this (along with many other things) contributed a
significant amount to their decision to go this route.

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japherwocky
what would make you think that popularity isn't real-time?

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Anon84
It takes some time for a post to be voted over another one. So you don't have
to propagate it immediately when it is first published.

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chaosprophet
Used to be less confusing before since it was presented in chronological
order. Think I'm going to be sticking with the "Live Feed" option for now.

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japherwocky
Does it make you nervous to know that a company with tremendously more
resources is moving into your pond?

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wheels
Nah, if it did I wouldn't be calling attention to it. :-)

Facebook is a walled garden. Whether or not we could beat them on their home
turf isn't something we've put a lot of thought into. Fortunately the rest of
the web is big.

The thing that solidified this for us at one point when we were trying to pick
our target sectors was thinking through the fact that Google can't index
Facebook (or any of the other major walled gardens) either and still manages
to pull together a pretty cohesive picture of the web.

