There are four new ways Facebook will let you control your news feed.
As the number of users on Facebook soars even higher, the
company is becoming more and more prudent towards its ever popular news feed.
As the first page that shows up for after login, the news feed may be a simple
portal, but its inner workings have been the work of many engineers and web
developers who have been understanding user preferences over the course of
Facebook’s lifetime.
However now, Facebook is introducing more robust ways to
control your news feed to allow a more intuitive experience on its social
network. It’s a combination of giving the users more control, as well as
adapting to them.
1. More Settings
From now on, users will be given a more diverse set of
options for controlling their news feed. Everything from what news to post on
their feed, to what kind of material to block will be available. Furthermore,
Facebook is taking a stricter stance on spam material and will allow users to
flag such material for analysis. Intrusive and unoriginal posts will be
archived and never displayed again for the users. The site will also use this
information for other users to protect them for spam and phishing website that could
be potentially harmful.
2. Adaptive Preferences
As the users click and/or ignore the posts on their news
feed, Facebook will be taking a look at your actions and slowly learn from your
behavior. It will record all of it to create a profile of preferences for you
specifically. This system of adapting to you preferences is something the
Facebook is borrowing from Google. For the longest time, the search engine has
been using your search key words to display appropriate web pages as well as
advertisement for you. Facebook could use this technique to display a more user
tailored post chain.
3. Better Algorithms
All the posts displayed in the news feed are due to a
back-end algorithm Facebook has implemented. However, after recent complaints,
the website has reworked their news feed algorithm. This new algorithm will
focus less on content quantity and more on quality to bring you less, but more
meaningful posts on your news feed.
The new algorithms have also been made to keep things
fresh by letting you chose what kind of topics you would be interested in. They
are similar to an algorithm used by news websites that will post news on the
front page simply based on the number of users from certain demo-graphs.
4. Trend Recognition
All posts on the news feed will be monitored as a whole
by Facebook. The reason for this is to recognize trends that may spawn from
current world events. For example, the Boston bombings sparked a huge wave of
news articles on Facebook, so the back-end recognized the event as important
for current day affairs.
Smarter trend recognition is still something of a work in
progress, but the current system is able to do the job well enough so that
Facebook news feed is able to bring you more relevant content that you would
most probably be interested in.
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Author Bio: Ellie Grace started making website since the
age of fifteen and has been involved with it ever since. She writes for Hirepaperwriter.com
to let users in on the secret behind the development of the biggest websites on
the internet.
