In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is having a press event on Thursday March 7, to showcase “a new look for news feed”.
Over the past few months and years, Facebook has been overhauling their search, ads, profile pages (aka timelines), et al, but the Facebook news feed has remained largely the same for a long time. In fact, the news feed has become even worse, with app statuses, trending articles and game suggestions boggling my news feed.
Thanks Facebook, but I’m not really a music, football, horoscope or flash gaming fan
I don’t want Facebook to drop these features completely. Well, actually, I do, but there’s a reason these features exist in the first place: revenue for Facebook. And, being a publicly-traded company, they are often forced to make decisions for the pure benefit of shareholders. What I want them to do, though, is to use their massive droves of user data to prioritize posts and suggestions on my news feed based on my interests.
Here, let me explain this with an example: I’m a techie and have liked the Facebook pages of many tech companies and news sites on Facebook. Now that Facebook knows about my interests, they should give low priority to suggestions about sports articles, music band pages, car fan sites, etc. Even among posts from my friends, tech-related and general posts should get higher priority over posts on how many times Justin Bieber tweeted that day.
Also, the order could be defined by context from the life of the user (winks at Scoble). If the user just got accepted at a university and makes that obligatory “OMG! I GOT INTO ______!” post, Facebook should start to prioritize university-related articles, posts and pages on their news feed.
All along, I don’t want them to start downranking posts into oblivion, just that posts and suggestions should have a relative order that makes sense.
Simple suggestion, isn’t it? Let’s see on Thursday what Zuck and co. have behind the wraps.