Facebook To Challenge Digg?
I just read on ValleyWag that Facebook is testing out a new feature where Facebook employees can vote on news feed items, thus marking what they feel is the most relevant or pointless. As you can see from the picture above, users will have the option to either “plus” or “minus” a news story, thus in effect “teaching” Facebook what you find interesting and what you find boring.
As it stands now, Facebook doesn’t learn much from users when it comes to how we read our news feed. Facebook only has a vague sense of what we read based on the settings that we input for our feed. But even still, how many of you actually read and click on every single news feed item you get on your Facebook home page? If you’re anything like me, you probably click on one or two things, at best. But, like I argued before, this new step is a way for Facebook to really learn what I, and you and everybody else, care to read about. Once this goes live, I will go crazy as I minus every single damn news item that has to do with my friend’s adding applications and if Facebook actually takes my votes into consideration, they’ll finally stop showing me those news items. It’s win-win for both of us, as I’m no longer pained by having to read about them every day and Facebook finally “learns” something else about me, which it can then somehow profit on.
Which leads to my next point, which is how this new feature will go perfectly with the new ads feature that Facebook recently debuted. Think about it. If you constantly tell Facebook that you are interested in when your friends add travel photos, then Facebook will gladly take that information and show you a few more adds for Travelocity than for Nike or Coke. With 50+ million members, this translates into much higher ad results, leading to happier advertisers and more money.
And finally, as I suggested in the title, this is a direct move toward the Digg style of content filtering, where instead of letting the computer decide what you should see and what you shouldn’t, the users are allowed to pick what gets the most attention at the top. It’ll be interesting to see if Facebook users adopt this new feature when it’s released or if it’ll just be another one of the “cool” features that Facebook has rolled out to little fanfare recently.
“Facebook only has a vague sense of what we read based on the settings that we input for our feed.”
That’s the whole truth. FB uses an artificial intelligence that decides what to show. The AI learns from users’ clicks on newsfeed items. (Notice the ref=nf parameters in the news feed links!)
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/10/29/facebook’s-news-feed-knows-what-you-did-last-summer/
But, I’m really looking forward to this new feature as the AI doesn’t work as well as it should.