41–50 of 80 posts
It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.
A facebook like is not the same as a follower on twitter and I'm not sure why people expect it to be.
Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getti…
That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken. If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.
Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getti…
In an ideal product, this would just be left up to the user to decide. You should have control over your own news feed.
For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline "Suggested" of "Featured" posts than they have now.
Facebook with Edgerank is a far better experience than pre-edgerank. And if you don't like edgerank, you can make your default to see all posts from most recent to least recent.
Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getti…
That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken. If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.
Is that reason because things are roughly sorted by time?
It's a timeline of interesting events in the recent history of your friends and interests. Being a "timeline" doesn't mean that it has to include everything. Should a timeline of the history of the USA include every event in the history of China? Not if you actually want to succeed in communicating any subset of the information on the timeline effectively...
People expect to sign in and see stuff about their friends. They don't expect to have to hand manage every single connection they ever make to decide who is or isn't worth paying attention to.
> Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken.
1) Twitter has extremely different use cases.
2) I think Twitter is horribly broken. I rely on non-broken external clients to sort and filter tweets; most high volume users do.
> If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.
Again, Twitter is a totally different use case. I might not want to unfriend my Aunt, who loves me very much, but I sure as hell don't want to see her every little post. I don't interact with her messages, so Facebook stops showing them to me. That problem seems solved to me...
Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getti…
That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken. If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.
Timeline and Newsfeed are two very different things. The feature in question is the newsfeed.
If you go to somebody's timeline (previously "wall") you will see every post they've made in roughly chronological order.
- Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are (let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank
- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.
- Yes, facebook defaults to the former setting, but that probably makes sense, right?
- That "reach 15% of fans" number, I believe, is a result of edgeRank functioning correctly. Obviously even if everyone got reverse chronological feeds, your update would STILL only be seen by a small percentage of users because it would be pushed down by more recent posts, right? So whether the user saw it would be based on whether you posted it right before the user checks their feed, and would just incent everyone to spam facebook updates like crazy,(which is how tumblr is right now) ... am I missing something here about that stat?
- Yeah, I guess maybe in both Google's and Facebook's case there are conflicting goals but I am not sure it is a conflict of interest. It is their business to make that newsfeeed (or Google's search results) as relevant as possible so you use their service.
- The dubious thing about Facebook's method is the promoted posts are not as clearly delineated from the feed as Google's adword results are. That, in my opinion, is the controversial thing here. Not making a clear distinction between advertising content and "normal" content.
- Ryan Holiday is a marketing genius whose primary tactic to to try to generate controversy, so, I think this article should be evaluated within that context.
If users wanted Twitter-like, see 100% of posts as the default, Facebook would have done it. They maximize for engagement 1st and then they monetize that engagement. For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline "Suggested" of "Featured" posts than th…
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…