Facebook’s new News Feed
Facebook sprung a surprise on its more than 300 million users today. It changed what “news” they see when they log on to the site.
The updated feed offers two options:
- News Feed: Which attempts to show you updates relevant to you based on a proprietary algorithm sorting content by who is close to you, what’s getting more comments and other heuristics
- Live Feed: Similar to the former real-time stream that had been the only previous view. Note that if you’re on the News Feed option, you see a little number racking up the number of posts that you aren’t seeing. (Great, yet another number of unread bits of content like email or RSS feeds to keep you stressed about falling behind in life.)
Another change was how applications can post to the stream, which are being standardized to help the news feed look less spammy.
I actually hadn’t been looking at the news stream much lately, finding it a chore to keep checking back and see what content has been added. Instead, I’ve been using NutshellMail, a product from an fbFund startup that was originally designed to help corporate users get around company firewalls blocking access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You give NutshellMail your login credentials and it fetches the latest updates from your social network on its own and consolidates it all into a single email. You can click on links in the received message and do many of the tasks like commenting and posting wall items that you would be able to do on the social network site itself. The email even includes reminders for friends’ birthdays and displays your latest Twitter followers and unfollowers.
NutshellMail’s key insight and innovation that came from filling a real user need ended up having wider applications. I thankfully don’t have to deal with corporate firewalls. But it is quite handy to have a service that sends me e-mail several times a day with the latest news from my social networks. I have set NutshellMail to give me updates three times a day, at 8am, noon and 4pm. I’m not always watching the real-time stream, where I anyway couldn’t possibly keep up with everything. But the app gives me nice dips into the stream to keep updated on my social networks without too much overload.
