Have you ever noticed that not every one of your friends appears regularly in your facebook's Newsfeed?
Have you ever connected with friends who, for whatever reason, never seem to appear at all and yet, if you visit their personal Facebook wall, you noticed that they have in fact, been participating all along. If they haven't already de-friended you, what happened there?
The truth is, Facebook does not provide you with a true reflection of the online interactions of ALL of your friends at any given moment in time. Instead, they provide you with the content that they believe is likely to be most engaging.
It makes sense, because should they stuff you with a chain of uninteresting newsfeeds, it will just going to bore you away and you might stop visiting all together - definitely the last thing they want in their revenue generating model.
So, this leads to your next obvious question: what does Facebook deem interesting and engaging enough content to appear in our newsfeeds then?
From my observation as a user, they place heavy emphasis on photos and on content that receives ‘likes’ and comments.
If you have recently considered viewing any of the Facebook’s “Photo Memories” where random pictures are posted on the top right hand corner of your photos page, the chances are, their freaky database behind their engine has got you - they have successfully dished out things that are of interest to you based on your usage.
Have you ever connected with friends who, for whatever reason, never seem to appear at all and yet, if you visit their personal Facebook wall, you noticed that they have in fact, been participating all along. If they haven't already de-friended you, what happened there?
The truth is, Facebook does not provide you with a true reflection of the online interactions of ALL of your friends at any given moment in time. Instead, they provide you with the content that they believe is likely to be most engaging.
It makes sense, because should they stuff you with a chain of uninteresting newsfeeds, it will just going to bore you away and you might stop visiting all together - definitely the last thing they want in their revenue generating model.
So, this leads to your next obvious question: what does Facebook deem interesting and engaging enough content to appear in our newsfeeds then?
From my observation as a user, they place heavy emphasis on photos and on content that receives ‘likes’ and comments.
If you have recently considered viewing any of the Facebook’s “Photo Memories” where random pictures are posted on the top right hand corner of your photos page, the chances are, their freaky database behind their engine has got you - they have successfully dished out things that are of interest to you based on your usage.
They are no charity organisation my friend, they are a billion dollar company who have thousands of mouths to feed and...hopefully in the process, knows what they are doing too.
1 comment:
Oh so that's the reason why? Sharks! Why should facebook decide for me what's interesting and engaging? If they are going to use some form of algorithm, shouldn't they look at how often I interact with that friend? e.g. commented, liked, wrote on wall, message etc? These are probably people that I'm more interested to know what's happening to them, no matter how boring or mundane their lives are?
You should catch The Social Network. Irrelevant here, just thought it's quite a nice movie.
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