Facebook is getting more personal with its latest News Feed update
In an unremitting bid to personalize the entire facebooking experience to billions of Facebook users, world's most popular social network giant has updated its news feed.
"We now know that it's only the users who know what is relevant to them and thus, we have come up with more preference options to provide the users with greater control over what they want to see first," wrote product manager for Facebook, Jacob Frantz in a recent blog post.
Posts will be arranged on the basis of a user's frequent interactions and interests with pages and friends he/she follows.
Facebook wanted the latest News Feed to serve the users with the most important and relevant stories. For this purpose, it will use the ranking technique to arrange and serve stories that are most interesting for users based on the content previously consumed the most and pages/people with most interactactions.
The change aims to declutter a user's News Feed off all the distant feeds and allows them to pick and rank their friends by importance and relevance. This gives a fair amount of control over who the users want to see on top of their feeds.
The latest update on Facebook's News Feed will also help users to easily find pages they liked or preferred to see posts from. This move certainly is intended to regain advertisers back on Facebook without cluttering a user's news feed.
Further, Facebook chooses not to unravel the precise details of its algorithms that help the company to determine what the users see and don't see based on the shrewd analysis of user preferences that it conducts. To put it simply, it's not the preferences alone, as data pertaining to clicks, comments, likes and the duration for which a user hovers over a particular post, all goes into Facebook's uber-intelligent artificial brain house. Facebook does a meticulous analysis of all these behaviors, preferences and networking patterns to serve you with what it believes will be of your interest and this includes advertisements as well.
The latest news feed update gives the users with an option to unfollow pages and friends that they do not wish to see. In addition, users get the option of reconnecting with folks whom they have unfollowed in the recent past.
As of now, the latest news feed preferences have been rolled out for iOS Facebook app users only and will be soon available for Android and desktop users in the next few weeks.