If you think that you can complain "But they are my fans! They belong to me! I deserve the right to be in their feeds" then be happy that Facebook is smarter than you: All those lovely fans would be gone in a heartbeat if Facebook didn't protect the advertisers from themselves. If you and all your advertising friends had it your way, you'd spam users until there were no users left to spam.
Timeline and Newsfeed are two very different things. The feature in question is the newsfeed.
If you go to somebody's timeline (previously "wall") you will see every post they've made in roughly chronological order.
Is that reason because things are roughly sorted by time?
It's a timeline of interesting events in the recent history of your friends and interests. Being a "timeline" doesn't mean that it has to include everything. Should a timeline of the history of the USA include every event in the history of China? Not if you actually want to succeed in communicating any subset of the information on the timeline effectively...
People expect to sign in and see stuff about their friends. They don't expect to have to hand manage every single connection they ever make to decide who is or isn't worth paying attention to.
> Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken.
1) Twitter has extremely different use cases.
2) I think Twitter is horribly broken. I rely on non-broken external clients to sort and filter tweets; most high volume users do.
> If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.
Again, Twitter is a totally different use case. I might not want to unfriend my Aunt, who loves me very much, but I sure as hell don't want to see her every little post. I don't interact with her messages, so Facebook stops showing them to me. That problem seems solved to me...
The internal heuristics generally seem to get it right eventually: I see true friend and family posts with essentially random delays of sometimes up to 2-3 days, but I don't actually miss any (I don't think).
I don't even bother trying to follow stuff I'm interested in on Facebook anymore. G+ does that sort of thing better anyway, at least for all of my interests.
One observation I have made is how facebook launches big changes in staggered roll-outs.
Among all the other obvious benefits, I feel a big one is that all people never get to complain at once. So even the most drastic of changes will be met with pockets of protests/backlash, giving enough time between different pockets for the uproar to cool off.
The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get", but I don't see it; Facebook's interest is to make money, not to guarantee equality of Facebook's posting. Even if you grant that their primary interest is to assure the highest quality feed, this doesn't go directly against that either since a paid post is not inherently worse than free one even if it skews that way.
What people are really objecting to here is the blurring of the lines between ads and organic content. Certainly it smells bad, but it's not the same as an investment bank shorting the very securities they're selling to clients, after all, you can still get something for free. All they've done is just is turned a formerly free service into a freemium service without removing any functionality. Sure they can ratchet up the cost arbitrarily, but you have no excuse to be screwed by that because you can dip your toe in any time to figure out if the ROI makes sense. If they didn't offer you the opportunity to pay for placement you would have been drowned out by the noise anyway. I think the business justification is precisely that: the stream is so noisy for most people that paid placement can be done without significantly degrading its quality. They may be wrong about this, but I don't see why they aren't justified to try.
Just last week I saw two stories, one on MIT Technology Review [0] and another on Fast Company [1] about Facebook's up-and-coming "Entity Graph." Ostensibly aimed at bolstering their search and informational relevance, neither article reported that many of these pages are scraped/imported content from Wikipedia and have been there since 2010, then called "Community Pages." Fast Company goes as far as to compare Facebook's efforts in this area to Wikipedia's, but doesn't mention that millions of pages are taken directly from Wikipedia. I did some digging on my own and found that at the time this was started, Wikipedia's director of business development was quoted as saying this was a positive development and viewed favorably by the foundation [2], but neither piece of reporting mentions anything about it. Both position Facebook's effort as being grassroots and not something seeded/bootstrapped off of Commons and a not-for-profit site.
[0] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook-nudges-...
[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3006389/where-are-they-now/entity...
As far as sponsored stories go, I prefer to those ugly banner ads. Much better UX and lot of times sponsored stories are relevant to me.
And as someone with a lot of people in my friendlist that often post in languages I can't understand, I wish they allowed me to filter non-image posts by language (so I'd only see German and English posts).
It's advertisers that are frothing at the mouth. Personally, I think it's a very good thing Facebook puts the interests of users above those of advertisers, at least up to some point.
For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline "Suggested" of "Featured" posts than they have now.
Facebook with Edgerank is a far better experience than pre-edgerank. And if you don't like edgerank, you can make your default to see all posts from most recent to least recent.
Twitter-like 100% visibility
Well, you're wrong.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when-sh...
-- implies that Twitter has a better model because you still see the same tweets in the same order even with a sponsored tweet up top, because tweets always come in a chronological order.
Maybe that works for Twitter, but I know I don't check my own tweetstream as often as I do my Facebook newsfeed. If FB showed me everything my friends and acquaintances did by default, including everytime they did something in Farmville2, I'd be less inclined to check FB.
And it's not a fair comparison because the FB newsfeed shows a variety of actions, from wall posts, to a posted picture, to entirely new photo albums...Twitter shows, for the most part, one kind of content: tweets.
I'm not saying that the OP isn't right here, that FB's model at its core could be problematic. I'm just pointing out that it's an advertising system that is a consequence of "weighting" the importance of each feed item.
then Google came along and made pagerank -- so relevance was actually based on relevance and not just ads
but then it acquired overture's patents and made the adwords, which is back to paying if you want to be on top
So I see the same game playing out all over again. Facebook can be the overture and we will be the google :)
Yes, Facebook and Twitter have pioneered the 'feed'... but they're also abusing it. To mix some metaphors, they're polluting the feed with inserts and glitz, or strip-mining their audience's attention. Some necessary innovation in how feeds could be sorted/filtered, strictly for the user's benefit, has been foreclosed by their business models.
Perhaps it's a little like the first generation of search engines and portals: a haste to monetize has caused them to overlook how deep and universal a user-centric feed-service could be. They are locking up their proprietary 'sources' of events well, and thus slowing the emergence of alternatives. But at some point a 10X-plus-better uncorrupted competitor could emerge, first among geeky early adopters, making people look back at Facebook and Twitter like they were Yahoo/Hotbot/Altavista.
I'm personally happy to put up with advertisements and whatever they think they need to do to optimise their earnings on this so long as they don't screw up so badly that there's no longer any value for me in using the site. That said I'd happily get a paid membership for a couple of bucks a month, to browse it free of ads (and sponsored stories etc) and perhaps get to beta test changes. I don't believe any such thing exists but I think that would be cool :)
If brands can't rely on Facebook to reliably deliver messaging to a significant number of their fans, then these brands will spend less resources (both effort and money) on cultivating fan bases on Facebook. Instead they'll focus on Twitter, Instagram or just reduce the scope of their social media campaigns in favor of something with more optimized results.
I think the real problem here is the PR problem of charging for something that once was free. It wasn't a great idea, and the Tumblr example serves to illustrate how it could've been done differently.
On FB, you're getting charged just to show the post, so it's more of a CPM model.
Seriously, how is this surprising? You want to use Facebook to increase your own business, you pay them. If anything, being able to reach a fraction of your followers for free is an evolution of freemium.
- Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are (let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank
- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.
- Yes, facebook defaults to the former setting, but that probably makes sense, right?
- That "reach 15% of fans" number, I believe, is a result of edgeRank functioning correctly. Obviously even if everyone got reverse chronological feeds, your update would STILL only be seen by a small percentage of users because it would be pushed down by more recent posts, right? So whether the user saw it would be based on whether you posted it right before the user checks their feed, and would just incent everyone to spam facebook updates like crazy,(which is how tumblr is right now) ... am I missing something here about that stat?
- Yeah, I guess maybe in both Google's and Facebook's case there are conflicting goals but I am not sure it is a conflict of interest. It is their business to make that newsfeeed (or Google's search results) as relevant as possible so you use their service.
- The dubious thing about Facebook's method is the promoted posts are not as clearly delineated from the feed as Google's adword results are. That, in my opinion, is the controversial thing here. Not making a clear distinction between advertising content and "normal" content.
- Ryan Holiday is a marketing genius whose primary tactic to to try to generate controversy, so, I think this article should be evaluated within that context.
That's not true. I use most recent and while it's probably filtering less, it still filters.
A facebook like is not the same as a follower on twitter and I'm not sure why people expect it to be.
They're getting around this by offering paid services that are outside their basic offering (services for business, messaging users outside your friend group, etc.)
See their post about always being free: https://www.facebook.com/facebook/posts/10150420085741729
It’s about as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get. One that only Facebook would dare to try.
It's less malignant than Google, Google also claims that they are impartial.
Google updates the algorithm or adds another 5-6 ads a page, you lose traffic; you have to advertise; they make money. They have a conflict of interests in wanting to have sites advertise and judging by Google's earnings it's working, for them
Changing it but what's the real reason of the algorithmic changes, not the stated one? Google controls both search and advertising.
Facebook cannot afford to let every business spam every person that has a "like," it would replace email spam in a short time. Of course Facebook would go out of business soon