Tag: news feed

Facebook “Suggests” Posts from Outside Your Network

Back in August, Facebook began a test that brought straight-up advertising to the news feed for the first time. This type of advertising isn’t really social, as it’s not based on the actions of friends.

“[W]e are beginning a very small test that will allow marketers to promote page posts to people beyond their fans in the news feed,” said Facebook at the time.

Translation: Facebook began allowing marketers to buy news feed ads for page posts that are way outside a user’s network. With a Sponsored Story in the news feed, the only way that it will show up is if you like the page or one of your friends likes the page. That way, the ads have some sort of social context and hopefully relevance. It’s the reason that Sponsored Stories can feel so organic as times.

But with these news promoted page post ads, a user could see a post from a page they’ve never even heard of – much less liked or interacted with.

Now, Facebook is continuing the test – this time with a new description for the ads. They still say “sponsored,” but they’ve also added “Suggested Post” to the stories.

Since Facebook began this test, another type of non-social ad has popped up in users’ news feeds: the mobile app install ads. Last week, Facebook made the ads, which allow developers to highlight their apps in anyone’s news feed, available to everyone.

Of course, advertising on Facebook has been a tricky venture since day one. The Sponsored Stories feel organic – that’s what they have going for them. These new types of promoted page post ads feel much less natural – because users and their friends aren’t really a part of them. What these new ads do have going for them is reach – the ability for marketers to target an audience that they wouldn’t have been able to reach before (in the news feed, at least).

Have you seen these types of ads in your news feed?

[Screenshot via Inside Facebook]

October 22, 2012
Facebook Displays Birthdays on Mobile News Feed to Promote Gifts

Last month, Facebook jumped into the ecommerce arean with the launch of “Gifts,” the company’s new gift exchange platform. You may remember a “Facebook Gifts” existing years ago, but that version only dealt with virtual goods. The new Facebook Gifts allows users to buy and ship real presents directly to their friends’ doorsteps – food, clothing, home goods, toys, etc.

When Facebook announced Gifts, they attached the tagline “Celebrate birthdays, new jobs, and other big moments.” There’s no denying that the success of Gifts relies heavily on users feeling compelled to send gifts to their friends. Birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, and new babies are just some of the life events that may compel a user to fork over the cash to send a gift via Facebook.

On the desktop version of Facebook, getting users to notice these types of events is no problem. They are displayed right there to the right of the news feed. Facebook just recently began to show events other than birthdays in this area.

But on mobile, birthdays and other events are not displayed prominently, and are instead either relocated to the events tab or not displayed at all. That’s all changing, mainly due to Gifts.

For both Android and iOS users, Facebook has begun to display birthdays at the top of users’ news feeds. But here’s the catch: you’ll only see it if you’re a part of a small group of users in the early test for Gifts. Android users will see the Gifts icon next to the birthday announcement, beckoning them to buy their buddy a present. iOS users can only receive gifts at this time. (Photo via TechCrunch)

It’s probably a good thing that Facebook unearthed birthdays on mobile, as it’s rare for anyone to check their events tab daily. This way, mobile users won’t miss these types of announcements. But this move is all about monetization. As more and more users access Facebook via mobile, Facebook has to figure out how to make money off them. They’ve already had a public struggle to monetize mobile via ads, but Gifts is something entirely different. It requires user interaction and user choice. Facebook can’t force a user to buy their friend a new shirt for her birthday like they can force a Sponsored Story into their mobile news feed. But placing birthdays (and probably other event announcements as well) at the top of their news feeds is one way to increase the chance that they will buy a gift (and earn a cut for Facebook in the process).

October 11, 2012
Is Facebook Getting Less User-Friendly?

Facebook is starting to do a lot more things to cater to businesses, but is it becoming less user-friendly in the process? Now that the company is public, it’s going to have to keep investors happy, and that means making money – hence all of the advertising-related changes we’re seeing. Last week, Facebook stock hit its lowest point so far, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apparently found to be quite painful. I wonder what additional monetization strategies are in store for Facebook’s future.

When Facebook released its first earnings report last month, it announced that it it has 955 million active users, with 552 of them using Facebook on a daily basis. Facebook’s great challenge will be to keep those numbers growing, rather than slipping, while also finding more ways to make money off of them. Hopefully, for users’ sake, they’ll be able to do it in ways that aren’t annoying.

Do you think Facebook is getting less user-friendly, or is it as good as ever? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Facebook is currently testing a feature that could turn off a lot of users – promoted posts in the News Feed from pages that you don’t “like” and that not even your friends “like”. If this moves beyond the testing phase, you’ll start seeing more ads in your News Feed, and for things that you quite possibly have no interest in or even a social connection to.

“Starting soon, we are beginning a very small test that will allow marketers to promote page posts to people beyond their fans in the news feed,” Facebook is quoted as saying.

A WebProNews reader commented on the story, “I am finding myself more an more annoyed with facebook lately. I barely ever use it anymore. This is just one more reason for me to never log in again.”

We recently reported on another promoted posts-related feature that had some users upset. This was a type of post that appears in the News Feed, and shows you when one or more of your friends “likes” a certain page, and shows a recent post from that page. Depending on the post, these friends may not always be pleased with the display.

At the time, ZDNet shared the perfect example:

Just because your friends “liked” drugstore.com, does not necessarily mean that they want to be used to help peddle lube.

Considering the recent Chick-fil-A controversy, it’s not hard to imagine people who may have enjoyed eating the restaurant’s sandwiches in the past and “liked” their Facebook page, only to have Facebook saying that they “like” it, while displaying a “recent post” that he or she politically disagrees with. Chick-fil-A, by the way, became one of the fastest-growing social brands on Facebook following that whole thing.

These are just a couple of examples of where we’re seeing Facebook seemingly putting business interests above users’.

Some users simply aren’t happy with the direction Facebook’s interface is going. The company is still in the process of getting the Timeline pushed out to all users, and as this continues, there is still a fair amount of bitter reaction to the major design changes. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of users who actually prefer the timeline, but some people just flat out don’t like it. It doesn’t really matter as far as Facebook is concerned, however. All users should have the Timeline by sometime this fall, the company recently told us.

Some users are just plain bored. A couple months ago, Reuters and Ipsos ran a poll finding that 34% of users (more than a third of respondents) find Facebook boring. These users are spending less time on Facebook than six months prior. Given that the poll itself is over two months old, I wonder how the numbers have trended in the meantime. According to Reuters’ these users complained that Facebook is either “boring,” “not relevant,” or “not useful”.

Luckily, third parties are continuing to find ways to keep a lot of Facebook users interested. It’s a good thing Facebook isn’t treating developers the way Twitter is. The Timeline, despite those who hate it, caters to this quite nicely. On the other hand, Facebook apps have always annoyed some users in one way or another. It wasn’t all that long ago when you could hardly get on the site without seeing a plethora of updates about what people were doing on Farmville.

Of course, when you have close to a billion active users, you’re never going to please everyone. There’s always someone longing for the days before Facebook even opened up beyond school campuses.

Do you think Facebook is moving in the right direction? Let us know what you think in the comments.

August 20, 2012
Facebook Tests Promoted Posts in Your News Feed from Pages Way Outside Your Network

Soon, you may begin to see promoted posts from pages that your don’t even like – or your friends don’t even like. You may see a post from a brand that you’ve never even heard of.

That’s because Facebook is testing a new ad format that will allow marketers to promote posts to users that have no real affiliation with the brand on the site. Yet.

Of course, the hope is that these out-of-network promoted posts will reach a much broader audience and thus grab more users to “like” the page. These new promoted posts for non-likers will show up in the news feed, and will feature a “like” button at the top right corner and a “sponsored” denotation on the bottom.

“Starting soon, we are beginning a very small test that will allow marketers to promote page posts to people beyond their fans in the news feed,” says Facebook.

Facebook also says that these ads may show up on desktop and mobile.

Before this test, any sort of promoted post or sponsored story that you saw in your news feed was there because you liked the page or because one of your friends liked the page. This new type of ad option would be huge for marketers, allowing them to reach a completely new audience of users who may have never heard of their brand. For instance, a new restaurant could target users in a certain city, even if they haven’t garnered any real “likes” yet.

Of course, this is just a test, and Facebook runs hundreds of tests every month. But something tells me this one will stick. It’s a clever way for Facebook to expand ad revenue and an improved way for businesses to expand their reach on the network.

But of course, it’s also Facebook getting one step closer to selling straight-up advertising on the site.

[Image courtesy Inside Facebook]

August 15, 2012
Facebook Is Putting Words In Users’ Mouths By Promoting Content From Pages They Like

There’s a new feature making its way to the Facebook News Feed that has some people up in arms. And while I’m usually the first to defend Facebook against the wrath of whiny, misinformed, overreactions from the Facebook population – I have to say that this time, they may have a reason to be upset.

You may or may not have seen a new type of post appear on your News Feed. It looks a lot like a promoted post, and shows that one or two or your friends “like” a certain page. Under that, it will show a recent post from said page. The main point though is that it’s not a promoted post, or a Sponsored Story. It’s simply Facebook promoting interaction with pages.

For instance, yesterday I saw such a post that told me Chris Crum “likes” Bing. Under that information was the lastest thing that Bing had posted to their Timeline. Seem innocuous enough, right?

Well, not always.

The problem with posts like this is that they can give the wrong impression – and that wrong impression can lead to a lot of embarrassment, or even worse.

ZDNet, who first reported on the issue, obtained this screenshot that captures (perfectly, I might add) the complications that can arise from this new type of post:

It’s obvious that the user had simply “liked” drugstore.com in the past, which is harmless at the core. But when the algorithm included drugstore.com’s most recent post and it had to do with lube, well, to the untrained eye it appears that the user is simply posting a link to K-Y Warming Sensations.

I’m sure you can see the problem here. It’s not a huge leap to imagine how something like this could be a reputation ruiner – or if nothing else cause someone to lose their auntie May’s friendship.

Facebook has issued a statement on the new type of post, which is not accidental:

To help people find new Pages, events, and other interesting information, people may now see posts from a Page a friend likes. These posts will include the social context from your friends who like the Page and will respect all existing settings.

Who knows all of the crazy pages that I’ve liked after one too man beers. With this new feature, any of the hateful, ignorant swill that pours out of whoever runs the page’s mouth is going to look like my own – or least look like I endorse it. Part of this is my fault, of course. I did indeed “like” the page. But part of the blame has to rest on Facebook for not immediately noticing how these awkward situations could arise.

July 13, 2012
Facebook Now Displays Timeline-Themed Business Cards When Hovering Over A User’s Name

Although the Facebook user base has been far from unanimous in their support for the Timeline, it’s pretty hard to argue with how it’s being implemented in a new feature in your News Feed.

Facebook has always given you a little bit of information about a person when you hover over their name on your News Feed, or on a post on someone’s wall or the like. Now, hovering over someone’s name displays a mini version of that user’s Timeline.

The mini-Timeline shows their profile picture, cover photo, a job description, mutual friends, and even gives you the ability to add them as a friend (or assign them a group) and initiate a private message.

The very first thing that I thought of when I saw this new Timeline view was that it strongly resembled a business card. Then, I remembered that a company called Moo debuted Timeline-themed business cards earlier this year. They look remarkably similar to Facebook’s new feature and display the profile pic, cover photo, job description, and website. And apparently I’m not the only one who noticed this right off the bat – Matt Brian over at The Next Web also pointed to Moo’s Timeline-themed cards.

But I’m not accusing anyone of anything. Let’s be honest, the Timeline on its own looks a lot like a business card (in shape and form). I guess it’s just a testament to the cool design of the Timeline that it looks so good in this capacity.

Will this make all users accept the Timeline – seeing how well it can be used in other areas of the site? Probably not. But you can’t deny that this is a nice little update from Facebook, and just one more way that the company is emphasizing the Timeline as your personal identity.

June 20, 2012
Facebook Rolls Out New Photo Layouts

Facebook is the world’s largest photo-sharing site, and it’s not even close. Every single day, users upload 250 million photos. Seriously, pause and think about that number for bit. Now imagine how many photos are uploaded in a week…a month…a year? It is estimated that Facebook actually houses somewhere around 4% of all photos ever taken in the history of the world.

With billions upon billions of photos, it’s no surprise that Facebook is focusing on that aspect of its users’ experience. It has been argued that the photo-sharing sphere is the ultimate future of the social network, and growth and user engagement is directly tied to maintaing dominance as the world’s premier place to look at pictures. A recent billion dollar acquisition should tell you that.

With all of that in mind, Facebook is beginning to upgrade the desktop News Feed to make photo-browsing more interesting. Last week, we told you that Facebook was starting to roll out new photo layouts to its users. The new layouts mimicked the ones that users have seen on Facebook’s iOS and Android apps – bigger photos and more photos displayed in posts.

For instance, here’s the large photo flanked by three smaller photo look that has appeared on mobile for a few weeks as it currently appears on the web version:

And that’s not the only one. Some users have begun to see a bunch of new layouts including a four-panel one and a nine-panel one.

Here’s what the four-panel layout looks like:

And here’s the nine-panel layout:

I’ve also spotted a new six-panel layout:

We mentioned that the News Feed photo layout redesign would also finally give pages the chance to display larger photos in posts. It appears that has begun to roll out as well:

June 11, 2012
LinkedIn Today Gets a Redesigned Interface

LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn’s social news feed, has just debuted a new, redesigned interface. The new, blocky style seems to take its cue from the new LinkedIn iPad app, and makes it easy to scan through stories and see who shared them.

Joann Wu, the senior designer of user experience at LinkedIn, detailed the interface changes over on the LinkedIn Blog. Wu states that a major design principle for the new LinkedIn Today page was simplicity. She used words such as “elegant” and “delightful” to describe how the news reading experience should be for users. From the blog post:

One of the core focus areas for LinkedIn Today has been to design a user interface that is engaging and simple to use. The default magazine theme layout creates a nice page hierarchy that allows users to quickly scan and identify the most interesting and relevant news and content.

Below each article is the option to share it or save it for later, as well as a list of which of a user’s network connections have shared the article. It’s also easy for users to customize the types of stories they see on LinkedIn Today. The “Customize Your News” tab, seen below, allows users to chose from dozens of industries and categories to follow on the site.

The design of LinkedIn Today does seem “elegant,” at least when compared with the jumble of the Facebook News Feed. The redesign is a good move for the professional networking social network, along with its recent focus on mobile. It fits with what LinkedIn’s goal now seems to be: to keep users on the site even when they are not actively looking for a job or an employee.

May 17, 2012
Facebook Sponsored Stories Double in Size

If you didn’t like Facebook’s sponsored stories you’re really going to hate this. Facebook has decided to double the size of brand pages sponsored stories in your News Feed. Now every time you see a brand that your friends like as a sponsored story at the top of your newsfeed, it will now contain a recent post from the page as part of the “story”.

Under Facebook’s previous scheme, pages would not be viewable in your News Feed unless one of your friends did something on that specific post. Now a post from a sponsored ad can become viewable in your NewsFeed without any engagement.

Advertisers will surely love it, as it makes it seem as though their ads are news, while taking up more page space and getting out more up-to-date information on their brand. Users will most likely hate it, as it is even more intrusive advertising on their page.

What’s obvious is that Facebook is trying to find a happy medium that allows them to maximize ad revenue, while keeping users from getting perturbed over disruptive messages.

The difference between the old and the new ads, is that old one had a much larger version of the brands profile picture, and listed all the friends that liked said brand. The new version emphasizes the brand pages content, appearing like any other story in your feed.

The bothersome thing about this new change is that the older version was instantly recognizable as an advertisement. These new ads are designed to blend in with other stories in your news feed. Although they would probably argue that this is less intrusive, It seems more like a trick. If I am going to see a sales pitch, I want to know that’s what I’m doing. Otherwise it comes across as that brand trying to wedge its way into my life without me knowing it.

Since Launching the Page-Like sponsored stories concept in January, it has seen two redesigns. Originally, it started as a simple line that told you about various brands your friends like on Facebook. It then grew to include the page’s profile picture, with thumbnails of your friends that also like the brand. Now we are seeing three levels stories involved with liking a brand. The people that like it, the logo of the brand they like and a news story from the brand they like. Here is what the progression of changes looks like. How long before your News Feed simply becomes a long list of advertiser’s stories?

When Page-Like sponsored stories was first introduced in January:

The most recent change in Marc; larger, much more intrusive:

The latest iteration; much larger, with three tiers of information:

[Source and Images: Inside Facebook]

May 14, 2012
Wavii CEO: We’re Making a Facebook out of Google

Remember when Facebook didn’t have a News Feed? At the time, it seemed great, but now, most users would be lost without the feed that keeps them up to date on everything their friends do.

Since the idea worked for Facebook, does that mean it can work for the whole Web? Adrian Aoun thinks it can and believes the proof lies in his startup Wavii, which recently launched into public beta.

Would you like to have a Facebook-like News Feed for all your news and information? Please share your thoughts.

As he explained to WebProNews, Wavii wants to make a Facebook out of Google. In other words, Wavii aggregates all the information that users typically go to Google for and puts it in a format similar to that of Facebook’s News Feed. This information goes beyond what your friends and family post and actually incorporates the big data problem that so many people are trying to solve.

Wavii attempts to unlock this information by teaching computers to understand “natural language.” Aoun acknowledges that this is no small task but believes it is necessary in giving consumers information in a format they want.

“We’ve taught our machines – our system, our engine – to kind of understand these thousands and thousands of concepts that people talk about,” he said. “What’s cool is that it’s learning more and more concepts everyday, much like you.”

“We’re kinda going past what a Google or a Bing does,” added Aoun.

Although Wavii aggregates and indexes information, much like a search engine would do, it doesn’t consider itself in the same way. Instead of indexing the content on each page, Aoun told us that Wavii finds the meaning behind each page and indexes it, which he believes is a clear evolution of search.

Another reason it doesn’t equate itself to a search engine is due to the user experience. With a search engine, users constantly click links that send them away from the page, but with Wavii, users stay and discover, just like they would on Facebook.

The challenging part to such a service, however, is the accuracy of the information. Raymie Stata, Yahoo’s former Chief Technology Officer, told CNN that making sure the information is correct is the hard part, not the analyzing of the information.

“What we do our best at is reporting the facts of what’s being reported on the Web,” pointed out Aoun.

He laughingly went on to say that Wavii would work on its accuracy right after it invents the toaster that walks. Putting the jokes aside, he did tell us that Wavii tries to remove the bias by pulling the meat of what’s being said and not the opinion. For example, if someone wrote, “I can’t believe Facebook bought Instagram,” Wavii would only include “Facebook bought Instagram” into its feed. One of the company’s goals going forward is to insert user opinions beneath the “fact,” but Aoun said it would be a while before that happens.

In terms of the social side of Wavii, users can join the service through Facebook Connect and, in the near future, Twitter. It also runs on a follow system much like Twitter or Path. According to Aoun, this model alleviates building a new network of friends. Wavii users can also customize their feeds to follow specific topics of interest as well as show various emotions to their feeds including “surprise,” “love,” and “anger.”

Aoun believes Wavii is distinguishable from StumbleUpon, Flipboard, and other similar services, since it allows users to sort through masses of information without reading all the details. He said it gives users more control by combining an information mining service and a reader-type service into one experience.

“We’re trying to unlock all the meaning on the Web and give users kind of that control or that power over everything that’s out there,” he pointed out.

Ultimately, Wavii wants to take all the information it can get, and present it in a way that users can best digest it. In other words, it hopes to go beyond search engines and also solve the problem of big data through a Facebook-like solution, which is fascinating. The question is, can Wavii succeed with this ambitious goal?

May 3, 2012
Facebook Granted News Feed Patent

Facebook was granted a patent today, which pertains to the layout of the famous News Feed.

Emil Protalinski at ZDNet points to the patent, called: “Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a member’s interactions in a social network environment.” Here’s the abstract:

A system and method provides dynamically selected media content to someone using an electronic device in a social network environment. Items of media content are selected for the user based on his or her relationships with one or more other users. The user’s relationships with other users are reflected in the selected media content and its format. An order is assigned to the items of media content, for example, based on their anticipated importance to the user, and the items of media content are displayed to the user in the assigned order. The user may change the order of the items of media content. The user’s interactions with media content available in the social network environment are monitored, and those interactions are used to select additional items of media content for the user.

This could have implications for Google, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, and any number of other social networks.This type of information display and user consumption is pretty much a staple of how social media works these days. Facebook has certainly been incredibly influential in that.

The company filed for the patent 6 years ago, and his isn’t even the first time Facebook has been granted a patent related to the news feed. In 2010, Facebook was granted the patent for: “Generating a feed of stories personalized for members of a social network.” Sounds pretty similar, eh?

Interestingly, Mashable reported in early 2010 that Facebook had been awarded a similar patent, with the abstract:

“A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.”

That report is linking to the same patent from today, with a different abstract.

It will be interesting to see if these patents lead to any major legal battles for Facebook. Protalinski suggests that Facebook may just use it to defend against other infringement accusations. Given Facebook’s rich history of fighting of the other so called “founders,” it’s probably not a bad idea for Facebook to get such things secured.

I just hope things don’t get absurd, the way patent disputes often can.

Facebook, as you may know, has been in a patent battle with Yahoo.

May 1, 2012
Surprise, People Loathe The New Facebook Changes

If Facebook rolled out a new feature that spit gold coins out of your USB port every time you liked a status, people would bitch about it. Many of the changes Facebook has made over the years that initially drew the ire of nearly everyone have come to be indelible parts of the social experience. Remember, guys – that News Feed that you are now ready to slaughter people over didn’t exist at one point. I’m sure there were more than a few “What the hell is this stupid crap”s when that originally rolled out.

In short, people hate change and have a predisposition to slam anything Facebook does within a minute of being exposed to it. Of course, that’s not to say that the anger isn’t oftentimes warranted.

So it’s not surprising that I thought the apocalypse was upon us when I woke up yesterday and jumped on the internet. There are a lot of people that are quite perturbed with the Facebook News Feed changes.

What do you think about the new changes to Facebook? Do you like the new News Feed and the ticker? Do you feel overwhelmed or confused? How does this update to Facebook compare to previous changes? Let us know what you think.

To briefly sum it up, here’s what Facebook had to say about the changes:

When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that. Updates slide down in chronological order so it’s tough to zero in on what matters most.

Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.

They have basically joined the “top news” and “most recent” tabs that were the options before the change into one stream that features real time updates as well as top news, determined by Facebook’s algorithm for what it thinks you want to see.

And then there is that ticker. In the top right of the new layout, Facebook has added a ticker that supposedly contains everything – status updates, likes, comments, photos, information changes, etc – all in real-time, so that you don’t miss anything.

OK. It’s definitely different. Let’s look at what some of my friends have had to say about the changes –

Hey! Just when I was thinking about dumping Google+, all this happens. Procrastination pays.

ok i gotta agree with everyone else…what is up w/ fb?! i don’t need to know what everyone is doing every second they are on fb!!!!!

Thinks Facebook has gone mad with all these new options, instead of making things easier, it appears to me they are making things more difficult, what say you????

screw u facebook, have we not all hated ur changes everytime for the last 8 years or what now?

Gahhhhh. Whatever, Facebook, Purchase World of Warcraft Gold.

Facebook really needs to stop trying to figure out what I consider “important” information….

#NewFacebook has been a trending topic on Twitter since the changes rolled out, and most of the tweets are negative –

@MelissaBlaha
Melissa BlahaThe #NewFacebook updates feel like they’re trying a bit too hard to me. Overwhelming and busy, with little payoff. #nothanks #antisocial 54 seconds ago via web · powered by @socialditto

@muff_inn
Paige Grimling OwenThe #NewFacebook is confusing! Leave the damn website alone we never like your changes. Ever. 1 minute ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

@liamsweeneyX
abcdefghijkliamX#newfacebook IS BULLSHIT. Total bullshit. 1 minute ago via web · powered by @socialditto

It’s obvious that the backlash is pretty severe. Warning, this is where I move into the opinion part of the article. Proceed at your own risk.

It’s not the end of the world. But there are some rather annoying elements to the new design.

That ticker…could be called the OCD feed or perhaps the “who gives a shit” feed. Honestly – too much information. And not too much relevant information, which would still be a problem, but too much information I simply don’t care about. It’s noble to try and put everything that happens in my Facebook world out there for me to see, but it ends up being somewhat of a headache inducer.

No, Facebook. I don’t care that a girl that I haven’t talked to since high school liked a photo of some guy that I don’t know’s trip to the Grand Canyon. I can definitely see how the ticker will have some fans, because it truly contains everything. For a person with a large amount of friends, however, this ticker could prove to be too much, too fast.

Not to mention the stalker-implications of the ticker. It let’s/makes you monitor everything that is going on with a person – every comment that my friends make on a public status or photo, every like they make, etc. Not that we didn’t get some of this with the old news feed, but the ticker takes it to an extreme

The ticker is keeping some semblance of privacy, however, as I haven’t spotted a situation yet where I’m being notified about a comment posted by my friend to a wall or status of someone who’s not my friend (unless that post was originally on my friend’s wall).

The new News Feed, like I mentioned before, is a mixture of top stories and recent stories. If you haven’t checked Facebook in a little while, it will refresh you with what’s been going on while you were gone with the “Top Stories” from X minutes ago. So far, Facebook has been pretty good with putting posts from people that I actually care about in this “Top Stories” section.

Others people here have said the opposite, claiming that their “Top Stories” have been from people they haven’t interacted with in years.

For me at least, the news feed isn’t that huge of a change. Except for the new categories labeling things as “recent stories” “top stories” and “from earlier today,” it looks quite similar to how it looked pre-changes. I still seem to be getting updates from the people I am used to getting updates from.

Not that this really bothers me, but I noticed earlier that the simple addition of the ticker and “people to subscribe to” box (a previous addition) has cluttered up Facebook a whole hell of a lot. Load up that chat box and you have this, which might be a nightmare to some users –

My mom will be calling me any time now…

Like most changes that Facebook drops on its 750 million users, I feel that this will simply become an accepted reality soon enough. Today, Facebook’s f8 conference kicks off. There, Facebook is expected to announce more new features coming to the Facebook platform. Check back with WebProNews for updates throughout the day.

What do you guys think? Love it? Hate it? Do you feel like jumping to Google+, now that it’s open to everyone? Let us know in the comments.

September 21, 2011
Facebook Changes How The News Feed Works

Facebook is expected to make a lot of big announcements this week at f8. More on those here. The company is hardly waiting, however, to go ahead and get other changes to the user experience out there ahead of time.

They already added the subscribe button, new friends list options and new sharing controls. Now they’ve announced changes to how the news feed works and the ticker feature that they’ve been testing for a while.

The news feed will now surface content based on your Facebook visiting habits. Facebook’s Mark Tonkelowitz explains:

When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that. Updates slide down in chronological order so it’s tough to zero in on what matters most.

Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.

The ticker simply displays updates from your friends as they post in realtime. This should keep you from missing things.

Facebook has a video explaining the features here.

September 20, 2011
Facebook Launches Subscribe Button, Gets A Little More Like Twitter and Google+

Facebook is rapidly releasing new features. There is a new recommendations feature for Pages that include locations, new email summaries, and new friends list options. Now, Facebook has made another announcement – the subscribe button.

“Until now, it hasn’t been easy to choose exactly what you see in your News Feed. Maybe you don’t want to see every time your brother plays a game on Facebook, for example. Or maybe you’d like to see more stories from your best friends, and fewer from your coworkers,” explains Facebook’s Zach Rait. “You also couldn’t hear directly from people you’re interested in but don’t know personally—like journalists, artists and political figures. With the Subscribe button, we’re making it easier to do both.”

The button will appear on people’s profiles. Users will be able to choose what they want to see from friends, subscribe to people that they’re not necessarily friends with, and make it easier for people to subscribe to your updates, even if you’re not friends.

Users can subscribe to all updates, most updates or important updates only.

“If you’d like to share your public updates with more than just friends, you can get a Subscribe button on your profile, too,” says Rait. “People who subscribe to you will get posts you set as “Public” in their News Feeds. This is an entirely optional feature – you need to opt in.”

There is a subscriptions page, where you can let allow subscribers. You can also decide who can comment and what notifications you get.

The feature will be rolling out over the next few days.

September 14, 2011
Facebook Now Grouping Your News Feed By Topic

If you are on Facebook today, you might see something different on your news feed. Now your friends’ posts will sometimes be grouped together based on the subject matter of those posts.

For instance, you might see a post that says “John Carter and 2 other friends posted about The Dark Knight.” All of the people mentioned as well as the topic will all link to their respective pages. The topic will be linked even if the original posts did not tag the actual pages.

Facebook announced this just a little while ago as part of a photo uploaded to their Facebook page (yes, Facebook’s Facebook page). Here’s what it looks like –

Note that Dmitry and Abhinai didn’t tag the actual Harry Potter page in their posts. But when Facebook groups the stories together by topic, they tag the page.

Not only will your friend’s posts about certain topics come bundled together, but so will posts by pages. For instance, Facebook grouped together three posts by Search Engine Land, Read Write Web and Mashable, all of which concerned Google.

Here’s what Facebook says about the change:

You may notice some of your News Feed stories are now grouped together by topic. We want to show you the most relevant and interesting information, and this test is designed to show you trends among what your friends are saying.

So – Facebook’s version of trending topics? Of course it’s not the same as trending topics on Twitter that concern large volumes of related content – global trends, and trends by country or city. It could serve as a more intimate way to utilize trending topics.

The other side to this brand new feed item is obviously the benefit to pages. Even if the original posters choose not to directly tag a page, this story aggregation will link to specific pages. Each time one of these “X and X posted about X” stories appears on a news feed, it’s a social advertisement.

There could be some hiccups to the new item, however. Facebook Google+Reader”>confirmed to Josh Constine that “its natural language processing doesn’t detect sentiment, how a Page’s name is being used, or whether the mentioned Page was actually the focus of the update. As such, the Posted About stories may highlight Pages that aren’t actually what a user was discussing, or that are being talked about negatively.”

That means that you might see a post that informs you about 4 friends posting about Harry Potter, but only one would be positive or relevant. You could have 3 “Harry Potter Sucks” posts and one irrelevant post like “My golf game is so magical I feel like Harry Potter out there.”

Still, this is an interesting new feature for brands and could allow Facebook to feel more immediate and connected. Trending topics seems to be something that people like across all social media platforms.

August 8, 2011
Should Facebook Give Users an Unfiltered News Feed?

We recently asked readers of Google and Facebook should be filtering our content for us? Many of you said no, but that’s what both have been doing for quite some time through various forms of personalization. It’s partially about noise reduction, and being served the content that is most relevant to us, but by doing this, we are living our online lives in what has come to be known as the “Filter Bubble”.

Should Facebook add an unfiltered version of the News Feed? Tell us what you think.

Google and Facebook aren’t the only two companies filtering our content this way. Many services do this kind of personalization. Just this week, AOL launched a new iPad Magazine, which is based on serving personalized content for each user. Google and Facebook are two of the most dominant sources of information, however. While Google hopes to play a bigger role in how we see information from our friends, brands, and those we’re influenced by on the social level, that role currently belongs to Facebook as the world’s dominant social network. It’s how the majority of social Internet users engage with content this way.

Eli Pariser, who coined the term “Filter Bubble” gave a popular TED Talk a while back discussing the concept in which he quoted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as saying, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

This would appear to be the philosophy behind the Facebook News Feed as it currently exists. You may “like” CNN, who might be running a story about people dying in Africa, but you might miss that if Facebook’s algorithm determines that you’d be more interested in seeing the bit about the squirrel from one of your neighbors.

The point is, you’re not seeing everything. What makes it more interesting is that the more Pages you “like” which should theoretically give you access to more information from sources you care about, the more information you’re going to miss, because all of these pages are competing with one another for that spot in your News Feed that you actually see.

Granted, Facebook’s strategy makes sense in some ways, because too much information is simply just too hard to consume, and it’s highly likely that you’ll miss some of it anyway, just because it will get pushed further down. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a completely unfiltered option? A way to see every single update from every single friend and Page you’ve associated yourself with on Facebook?

Remember – you’re the one that chose to become friends with these people or “like” these pages. You control that.

Well, it appears Facebook may be readying a new News Feed that will give us this unfiltered look at our social graph. A new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that Facebook is going to be changing the way the News Feed works sometime soon.

Shayndi Raice And Emily Steel report: “Now Facebook engineers are working to create an unfiltered News Feed that would open the floodgates of information about users and the games they win, the companies they ‘Like’ and the actions their friends take, said people familiar with the matter.”

I’m going to assume that such a version of the feed would be one option for viewing the feed. As it stands now, Facebook gives you options like Top News, Most Recent, Status Updates, Photos, Links, Pages, Questions, and of course various lists you may have set up yourself. It gives you plenty of ways to filter the News Feed, but not so much a way to get a completely unfiltered version. Most Recent is the closest thing, but even that isn’t 100% unfiltered.

It will be interesting to see if Google opens up an unfiltered version of the Google+ stream. Google’s “circles” only add to the filter bubble concept, for the reasons we discussed here. People will be more inclined to share with select groups of people, leaving those outside of the circles potentially missing out on interesting content. Google even filters the streams for specific Circles too though. You don’t see every update from everyone in every Circle.

Expanded “Like” Button Functionality

According to the WSJ report, “Facebook is also working on expanding its ‘Like’ button to include other gestures that marketers and third-party developers can create, said these people. Consumers could share information about the products they want to buy or the places they want to go, for instance.”

While we don’t know exactly what this will entail, simply giving consumers more ways to share your brand/products could be huge for businesses, particularly in combination with an unfiltered News Feed, which should by itself get your brand in front of more eyeballs automatically.

As it stands right now, there are things you have to take into consideration if you want to optimize for the News Feed, and “EdgeRank,” which is the basis for Facebook’s news feed algorithm. Earlier this year, we looked at a report from Buddy Media, a company that’s built a business out of creating Facebook tools for businesses and counts a bunch of major brands among its clients. They suggested the following ten tips for boosting your chances of getting seen in the news feed:

1. Ask questions
2. Post games and trivia
3. Interact with fan engagement
4. Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
5. Incorporate relevant photos
6. Relate to current events
7. Incorporate videos
8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
9. Include links within posts
10. Be explicit in your posts

If Facebook’s unfiltered News Feed is just an option, you’re probably still going to want to consider these things, because it’s still going to be helpful to get into the filtered feed as well. Plus, these things are simply good for engaging users.

Do you want to see Facebook offer an unfiltered option? Let us know in the comments.

August 4, 2011
Facebook Gives Users More News Feed Options

Facebook is now giving users a way to better filter their news feeds so they can really see the content they want. In the past, users have been able to choose whether they want to view "top news", which is a collection of updates that Facebook has deemed most important for you to see based on various algorithmic factors, or "most recent", which just showed you everything in reverse-sequential order.

Now, the "most recent" link is accompanied by a dropdown menu that provides users with more options: status updates, games, photos, links, pages, and lists that the user has created. So, if you want to just see all the links people have shared, you can look at those. If you want to see status updates only, you can do that.

The feature could actually get people using Facebook’s lists feature more. Mark Zuckerberg said that nobody uses them, when the company announced its Groups product recently. If users are presented with the option to view the lists right from their news feed, they may be more inclined to set more up and look at them more.

Facebook design changes are often greeted with a lot of criticism from users, but it’s hard to imagine anyone having a problem with this change. It simply gives the users more options, and the default is the same as it has been ("most recent" being the starting point.

Will you use these new news feed options? Will you create more lists now?

(Hat tip to Inside Facebook)

December 22, 2010