How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

So this variation on advertising is just a consequence of Facebook using an algorithm to fill your "top stories" feed as opposed to a chronological feed. The NYT article that the OP refers to:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when-sh...

-- implies that Twitter has a better model because you still see the same tweets in the same order even with a sponsored tweet up top, because tweets always come in a chronological order.

Maybe that works for Twitter, but I know I don't check my own tweetstream as often as I do my Facebook newsfeed. If FB showed me everything my friends and acquaintances did by default, including everytime they did something in Farmville2, I'd be less inclined to check FB.

And it's not a fair comparison because the FB newsfeed shows a variety of actions, from wall posts, to a posted picture, to entirely new photo albums...Twitter shows, for the most part, one kind of content: tweets.

I'm not saying that the OP isn't right here, that FB's model at its core could be problematic. I'm just pointing out that it's an advertising system that is a consequence of "weighting" the importance of each feed item.

Nope. This worked for a while, however.

Facebook has every right to promote paid posts, and Google has every right to promote paid links despite not exercising it. And we as users have every right to decide whether we find the Facebook feed and Google search results relevant and useful based on that. When Facebook's policy starts effecting the quality of their services for users and companies, people will stop using it, just as if Google's search results lowered in quality people would switch to something else.

AFAICT there is no solution on the receiving end. Your feed is going to be filtered or delayed by the Facebook gremlins and there's nothing you can do about it.

The internal heuristics generally seem to get it right eventually: I see true friend and family posts with essentially random delays of sometimes up to 2-3 days, but I don't actually miss any (I don't think).

I don't even bother trying to follow stuff I'm interested in on Facebook anymore. G+ does that sort of thing better anyway, at least for all of my interests.

I think this is a hint to the real opportunity for App.net.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have pioneered the 'feed'... but they're also abusing it. To mix some metaphors, they're polluting the feed with inserts and glitz, or strip-mining their audience's attention. Some necessary innovation in how feeds could be sorted/filtered, strictly for the user's benefit, has been foreclosed by their business models.

Perhaps it's a little like the first generation of search engines and portals: a haste to monetize has caused them to overlook how deep and universal a user-centric feed-service could be. They are locking up their proprietary 'sources' of events well, and thus slowing the emergence of alternatives. But at some point a 10X-plus-better uncorrupted competitor could emerge, first among geeky early adopters, making people look back at Facebook and Twitter like they were Yahoo/Hotbot/Altavista.