News Feed (Facebook)

News Feed is a feature of the social network Facebook. The web feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. Using a proprietary method, Facebook selects a handful of updates to show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 2,000 updates they can potentially receive.

Over two billion people use Facebook every month, making the network's News Feed the most viewed and most influential aspect of the news industry.

Before 2006, Facebook simply consisted of profiles, requiring the user to visit a profile to see any new posts. On September 6, 2006, Facebook announced a new home page feature called "News Feed". The new layout created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activities. Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused discontent among Facebook users, many of which complained that the feed was too intrusive, detailing every moment with timestamps, and violated their privacy. Some called for a boycott of the company. In response to this dissatisfaction, CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement clarifying that "We didn’t take away any privacy options", and later issued an open letter apologizing for a lack of information on new features and users' controls, writing "We really messed this one up. [...] I'd like to try to correct those errors now."

The News Feed has received multiple updates over the years since its original setup. In 2008, Facebook added a feedback button to each story in a user's feed, letting them tell the service about their personal preferences for their feed. However, the feedback button was removed in April, and returned in July, with Facebook reportedly removing the first iteration of the feedback options due to a low impact on user satisfaction compared to other aspects of the algorithm.

In March 2009, Facebook rolled out the option to "Like" a page to see updates from it in their feed, gave users customizable filters to determine what friends they wanted to see News Feed updates from, and also added a publishing field at the top of the feed, previously exclusive to user profiles, for easy post creation. The publishing field contained the text "What's on your mind?", a similar but also notably different question from Twitter's "What are you doing right now?" A few weeks later, the company introduced controls to reduce content from app interactions, and enabled the feed to show photos in which friends were tagged.

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Wikipedia