Facebook is the boss of it all, making live experiments on us, users all around the world that want no more than to interact on a decent basis and maybe keep away from the unnerving advertising posts. But the more we try to keep things normal on Facebook, the harder it is to keep all the information rolling out at a normal pace.
Our newsfeeds are stuffed with info we don’t want to know about, from publishers that don’t matter that much to our tastes and expectations, and friends who don’t have trouble sharing their uninteresting findings.
Facebook has been trying to optimize its tools in order to help us tidy up our feeds, by allowing us to unfollow people but still remain friends with them, by choosing friendship degrees for our new connections on the social network and by selecting the information they think suits us best.
Starting with today, Facebook has begun testing a complementary news feed settings function that promotes specific content dubbed as “see first”. According to the update, users can simply click on a friend’s “following” button and then select “see first” from the menu, to activate it.
The service is still in its testing phase and we will soon know if it will take over all the Facebook pages around the world. Facebook released the service for a limited set of users and there is no certain information that the new service will go live to the general public.
With this new feature Facebook tries to offer users more control to rank their connections upon interest. It basically enables you to offer added value to what you are interested in finding on Facebook so that they can further select what could seem entertaining or interesting for you.
This will be one more selection algorithm that can work for or against publishers struggling to hold on to their public and keep their connections. On the other hand, the selection criteria is helpful in understanding what exactly makes people tick and pick a subject instead of another.
For basic users, the news feed will get a little better, as the “strength” of our connections with friends play into its algorithm that selects and offers back the information that presumably interests us.
On the other hand, for reorganizing our Facebook feeds we didn’t need that much, as the simple unfollow button or the friends selection lists offer great help with that. The new Facebook experiment is most probably part of a larger initiative to control the information Facebook receives in a better way. And this is not necessarily better for us. Yes, Facebook will release a new tool to personalize our news feed but our news feeds are already ours to personalize, so what else is there?
Image Source: telegraph.co.uk
