News feed is Facebook's key battleground.



Panic Alert

Newsfeed is just a random message board
Attention everyone! Facebook is about to implement another major change- they plan to revamp News Feed! Judging from peoples reaction when News feed was implemented, world-wide chaos is almost certain. The world of social media will once again be shaken and people's status updates will once again be filled with stuff like: "FU Facebook! You screwed me over again", "Facebook please leave my news feed alone", "That's it! I am leaving Facebook ". My news feed will be flooded with these comments and there is nothing I can do about it but suffer the deluge of negativity. But I am hoping that one of the things Facebook changes with News Feed this Thursday is my ability to filter these types of comments out.

Like many of the people I know on Facebook  I was not happy when "News Feed" was implemented. It was not that I hated the idea of news feed but it was more of a design issue. I use twitter also and I understood where Facebook was trying to go with news feed, but it just did not work. Instead of being a way to easily access and read through my friends updates, it functioned more like a random feed of random things I do not even care about. Instead of it being a way for me to easily stay up to date with what my friends were doing in their lives, it ended up confusing me with updates that I could not organize. News feed was just there- right in the middle of my screen- and I did not know what to do with it.

This was my biggest beef with news feed- my inability to control it, organize it, and make sense of it. This is what I am hoping Facebook changes this Thursday. Let me give you an idea of how I think News Feed should work.

Dashboard with Tabs for Organizing feeds my way

If you ever used Tweetdeck or Hootsuite or any other Socialmedia management app, you will know what I am talking about. News feed should allow me to organize my feeds into things I consider relevant (ie. Status Updates from a select List of Friends, My Friends Photo uploads/tags, My Friends Check-ins, Music my friends are listening to, etc) into Tabs. Having this functionality will allow me to better make sense of my Facebook feeds and will make me spend more time inside Facebook too. This option will be great for facilitating Social Discovery from inside Facebook.

Hootsuite dashboard allows me to manage my twitter feed. I should be able to manage my Newsfeed in a similar way
Throughout the last couple of years, a lot of things Facebook offers has been eaten up by start-ups that focus on one specific social-interaction (ie. Photo sharing- Instagram, Status Updates- Twitter, Location sharing- Foursquare). These services have made a killing by focusing on key social interactions that people need- everyone wants to share pictures of their cats and everyone wants to tell everyone they ate at a fancy restaurant. That is the key to those start-ups success and that is the business that Facebook needs to win-back with a more meaningful News Feed.

Allowing users to Customize their News Feed into tabs will reduce the need for users to actually use other social networking services that focus on one thing only. Say I have News Feed Tabs for Photo Updates, Check-ins, and Music. Having access to these types of Social feeds within Facebook itself will reduce my chance of needing to use services like Instagram or Foursquare. This essentially turns Facebook into my main and only Social Networking Hub.

Content Discovery from News Feed

With over 1 Billion users, Facebook has grown into a major part in many people's lives. Even with a dysfunctional News Feed today, people are still finding interesting things in Facebook and are still interacting heavily through it. People are also sharing a lot of things in Facebook these days due to a lot of mobile apps and services integrating Facebook share options within their service. With more and more content being shared on Facebook each day, I believe Facebook is sitting on a treasure chest of content waiting to be discovered and as a user I want to access that.

We also saw recently that Facebook has started to index all content shared and stored in its server to facilitate its Graph Search service. With this indexing, the other thing I want my News Feed to do is allow me to discover meaningful content. It should allow me to have a feed of content my friends are liking or sharing on Facebook (ie. News Articles, Books, Music, etc).This functionality will allow me to easily access content me and my friends like and will greatly improve my experience within the app. I want Facebook to start feeling like a tool to help me deepen my understanding of my social network by easily discovering things we share in common. I hate the way Facebook now a days feels like a complaint board where people just post random stuff without any meaningful content. The fact that Facebook has started to index all its data means this should be possible. I am very hopeful that this will be one of the things the company changes and I am confident it will as this fits perfectly with its Graph Search roll out. 

For now I will keep my fingers crossed and my hopes high, but I am not holding my breath for it. Tomorrow we will see exactly what the company has planned for its very dysfunctional news-feed. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Justice is blind but the scale is rigged when it comes to whistleblowers.

Image
General David Petraeus was sentenced to two years probation and a $100K fine for leaking classified information (link to  plea deal ). This sentence is nothing short of an insult to the justice system in the United States. It is a clear example of how the justice system in the United States is rigged.  Let us recall what got Petraeus into this mess by looking at two things - i. What did he leak? ii. What was intention for leaking the information?  What did he leak? Petraeus leaked names of covert operatives, war plans for US forces, and detailed discussion with senior officials including the US President. This information was contained in notebooks that Petraeus kept for himself. He then gave Paula Broadwell access to these notebooks to help her write his biography. The information contained in those notebooks are highly classified by any standard and had the potential of endangering US covert operatives.  When Chelsea Manning leaked the Afghan war-logs to WikiLeaks th
Read more

Tim Cook on Privacy.

Apple is leading the way in promoting user privacy in the digital age and recently Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a speech during an event in Washington where he made some very important and controversial points about privacy in the digital age.  "Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security...We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it.” This statement is supported by Apple's action being the first major phone manufacturer to make encryption as a default in its Operating System. It goes to show how serious Apple is in protecting customer privacy and in not making money out of customer information. There are hundreds of millions of iOS devices all over the world and each one is connected to the internet. Whenever these devices connect to the internet
Read more

How a robbery in 1976 robbed US citizens of their privacy in the digital age.

B altimore - Shortly after midnight on March 5, 1976 Mrs. Patricia Mcdonough was robbed just outside her home. She was able to take a good look at the robber and his 1975 Monte Carlo automobile. A few days after the robbery, Mrs. McDonough started receiving threatening phone calls from the man claiming to be the robber. Mrs. McDonough started recording some of these threatening phone calls and notified the police. On March 13, the police asked the telephone company to install a terminating accounting equipment on Mrs. Donough's telephone line to determine the origin of the calls she was receiving. The police found out that most of the calls were made from pay-phones near McDonough's residence.  On March 16, in the general vicinity of Mrs. McDonough's home, someone asked a police officer for help in opening the locked door of his 1975 Monte Carlo. The officer helped the man, took down his plate# and notified the investigating officer.  The police ran the plate # and tra
Read more