Facebook - New News Feed
Facebook's quest to be a personalized newspaper for the Internet
age continued on Tuesday with tweaks aimed at making sure members spy hot
stories from their friends.Changes to the leading social network's formula for
figuring out which posts will be of interest included "bumping" up
potentially intriguing stories that went unnoticed during prior visits to
Facebook."It is hard for users to get back to old things; you have to
scroll through things you have already seen," Facebook news feed team
engineering Lars Backstrom said while discussing the latest changes."We
wanted to make it so people weren't missing important stories that didn't make
top slots but were just below the fold."Signals weighed in the machine
learning algorithm were modified to bump-up a story considered more interesting
than fresher material that formerly got priority simply for being newer."We
tweaked the model," Backstrom said, noting that about 30,000 signals are
balanced in the algorithm."Instead of just taking the new stories, we
would take all stories that were new to you, that you haven't seen, even if it
isn't the freshest."
A test of the change showed that the number of stories people read
in news feeds rose to 70 percent from 57 percent with "bumping,"
according to Facebook."Story Bumping is going to be a really nice tool for
people if they are sitting with a Facebook account and have run out of things
to look at," said Facebook vice president of product Chris Cox. "It
will bump up new stuff."News feeds were also modified to take into account
the "last actor" a member interacted with and then give that friend's
posts temporary priority since they seem to be up to something interesting."We
wanted to capture your current state of mind as you were using Facebook,"
Backstrom said."A lot of signals are long term, such as the relationship
with each friend; we wanted a real time factor."Facebook's ranking
software assigns numerical scores to the roughly 1,500 stories typically
eligible for delivery to a member's news feed and displays the top 300.Powerful
factors for ranking are relationships, along with how often a member comments,
shares, "likes," or otherwise acts on posts of friends. Hiding posts
sinks content from that person in news feed rankings.
"Our goal is to create the best personalized newspaper for
each of our readers," Backstrom said.Facebook engineers are experimenting
with ways for News Feeds to better handle chronological posts, such as a friend
firing off play-by-play updates from a sporting event.Backstrom's team meets
each Tuesday to brainstorm ways to improve the Facebook news feed, with
worthwhile ideas tested internally among workers or with a tiny fraction of the
social network's more than one billion members."It starts with intuition
and then that gets written into code as a feature," said Cox. "Then
we look at interactions."Ads displayed as promoted posts in news feeds are
handled separately from content generated by people's friends or family members
at Facebook, according to the ranking team."We figure out the most
relevant news feed with the organic content, and then, as a newspaper or
television program might do, we create advertising slots," said Facebook
product manager Will Cathcart.Backstrom compared the job of ranking news feed
posts to the challenge faced by Internet search engines Google or Bing when it
comes to quickly determining optimal results for queries."Facebook is one
of the only places where you have a problem on the same scale as what Google or
Bing is doing but you have to use different techniques because of the personal
aspects of it," Backstrom said.
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