Facebook News Feed turns 10, CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanks users for making it a success
Facebook News Feed has turned 10 today. It has been exactly ten years since Facebook first introduced us to what surely can be called the backbone of the social network.
News Feed is what greets the company’s over 1.5 billion users when they first login into the website, both via desktop or smartphone. Till Facebook added the News Feed, Facebook was just a collection of profiles. Users could visit a friend’s page, but there was no way to see updates from their friends or vice-versa. Facebook News Feed provides users a platform for this and more.
On the ocassion, CEo Mark Zuckerberg too has shared a post on Facebook, titled “Happy 10th birthday, News Feed!”. Calling News Feed one of his favorite stories from Facebook’s history, he write, “This invention is one of my favorite stories from Facebook’s history. Sometimes people talk about the “idea” behind Facebook, as if it was a single concept that came out fully formed. But Facebook, like everything, is made of many ideas and inventions.”
“Technically, News Feed is one of the most advanced systems we’ve built. For more than 1 billion people every day, it considers everything your friends are posting and all of the media content you might be interested in, it considers how much you might care about updates from each person or interest, and then it tries to show you what you’ll find most important. Nothing like it has ever been built before,” he adds further in the post.
Zuckerberg concludes with a thank you note to the News Feed team over the years as well as to the company’s users who have made it a success. ” …thank you to the members of our team — past and present — who have built and improved News Feed over the years. And thanks to our community for growing with us. Everyone’s News Feed is unique because each of you is unique, and we’ll keep working to make Facebook a better place for all the moments you share,” wrote Zuckerberg in the post.
Over the years, the News Feed has also witnessed various changes. In the laterst update that rolled out in early August, Facebook claims to have created a new ranking signal to predict what is most informative to users, so those stories appear higher in their feed.
In another update, during the same month, the company announced that it is changing the News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines. “With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds,” the company said announcing the change.
