Facebook Testing New Feature in News Feed to Encourage More Conversations

However following an internal probe, Facebook said that it found no evidence of any bias, with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also meeting with more than a dozen conservative politicians and media personalities to discuss issues of trust in the social network. It’s not just Facebook, other social media companies want users to be more engaged on their networks.

The curated feed showing what your friends were posting and discussing launched on September 5, 2006 as a central destination so users didn’t have browse through friends’ profiles to see what’s new.

Over the past 10 years, News Feed has had many ideas, features and interfaces and thus it’s worth celebrating its 10th birthday and that it has survived until now.

“This invention is one of my favourite stories from Facebook’s history”.

The oft-requested dislike button never came to fruition, but Facebook launched a set of reactions globally in February, allowing people to express love and anger or say “wow” or “haha”. Facebook’s AI system runs tens of trillions of queries per day to make about six million predictions per second.

At the beginning of Facebook, there was no News Feed.

“I had friends who I hadn’t talked to in years saying, ‘You just ruined something I really cherished”. You could visit a friend’s page to look up some basic details about them, but there was no way to see updates from all your friends or be sure they saw yours. Numerous 17 million Ice Bucket Challenges videos were shared in News Feed, inspiring friends to take the challenge. And you could see what was happening with all your friends in one place.

Initially, News Feed wasn’t in real-time.

Not everyone liked the idea immediately. I remember there were actual protesters in the streets outside our office demanding we change.

The Facebook CEO calls “News Feed has been one of the big bets” from them and how it has also shaped the internet. “But by giving people access to more information and helping promote diversity and a plurality of opinions, we can build stronger communities”. The amount of comments per post will directly be visible, letting friends know whether it is a particularly popular one.

So thank you to the members of our team – past and present – who have built and improved News Feed over the years. It was wonderful. We had this massive communications infrastructure, but we still couldn’t answer the question: “What’s going on?” Everyone’s News Feed is unique because each of you is unique, and we’ll keep working to make Facebook a better place for all the moments you share.

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