Facebook is set to unveil a redesigned, possibly much more graphic News Feed Thursday. But it won’t just be hard-core techies checking out the redesign; there are also plenty of big egos and big businesses obsessing over how you interact with your Facebook stream.
Facebook’s unveiling is set to take place at the social network’s Menlo Park, California headquarters, where reporters have been promised a glimpse of “a new look for News Feed,” the main information stream shown to users. Celebrities, media companies, nonprofits, and businesses, who depend on the News Feed for much of their attention, will be keen to see the contours of the new design, like whether it features giant images and new substreams for news and photos, as TechCrunch has reported.
The Facebook News Feed has emerged as an unlikely lightning rod in the past six months, drawing intense interest from a diverse array of unlikely tech pundits ranging from billionaire Mark Cuban to The Wall Street Journal to author Ryan Holiday to Wal-Mart to Star Trek star George Takei, all of whom would like Facebook to insert more posts from their Facebook pages into more people’s news feeds. Just this past Sunday, New York Times tech columnist Nick Bilton wrote about his own frustration that only three hundredths of a percent of the people who have subscribed to his Facebook feed end up finding any of his links and liking or resharing them.
Because Facebook aggressively filters the News Feed, many users never even see a piece of content to which they are subscribed, nor do they always see posts to a page they have “liked.” The elaborate filtering system behind News Feed, known as EdgeRank, screens content based on clues like which posts, people, and brands you have liked, hidden, or commented upon in the past. News media, video-sharing sites and videogames have all been hot on News Feed at one time or another only to fall back to Earth as EdgeRank evolved. Because EdgeRank filtering can be bypassed by paying Facebook, the company is regularly accused of making the filter ridiculously tight, but Facebook says EdgeRank is tweaked only to keep users happy.
There’s no indication that Facebook will unveil Thursday any changes to EdgeRank.
But simply changing the look and feel of News Feed could impact what content becomes popular and thus what content gets shown by EdgeRank, without payment to Facebook. Photos from your friends, news from journalists, and promotions from local businesses you have “liked” have traditionally been mixed together. If Facebook moves to separate this content into category silos, that might hurt content that’s more commercial, since Facebook users naturally gravitate toward shares from their friends. Conversely, an emphasis on big splashy images could help advertisers and news publishers, who can afford to spend lavishly on stunning pictures and immersive video.
It might seem silly to get wound up about a redesign of a section of a social website, particularly when that section is so often used to share humorous cat pictures and forwarded jokes. But for many people and organizations, News Feed is serious business. And Thursday will be a big day.
