This morning, Facebook announced a series of changes to their controversial news feeds product. Here are the two major modifications.
- First, Facebook has introduced a “slider” system,
much like a graphic equalizer, that lets you control how much of each type of information you see in your friends’ news feeds. For example, if you want to see more about relationship information and less about group adds, you simply slide the appropriate toggle. - Second, Facebook has introduced 20-member personal
whitelists and blacklists. Want to see everything about one person? Throw them on your “More about these people” list. Want to not get updates about this person but not have to defriend them? Put them on your “Less about these people” list.
This move is in response to some very fundamental user experience challenges the Facebook feeds introduced. The average Facebook user has hundreds of friends, many of which frequently update the profiles or engage in activity that creates news feed items (10 types of action in total). Furthermore, of those hundreds of friends, many of them are only nominal friends – people that you aren’t really interested in seeing everything they do in life. With all of this information being shared, the average Facebook user was being deluged with more information than they could process. This was a classic case of information overload.
These changes should go part way in helping Facebook users deal with the information overload feeds introduced. However, they aren’t perfect. It is quite obvious that limiting the “less about” list to 20 people is a poor choice, as the average Facebook user has more than 20 people who could easily go on this list.
The other things the more/less about lists introduce are very interesting internal data. One of the core challenges in a SNS is identifying “real” friendship in the service. Facebook has attempted to do this with social timeline, but I think this move is the best to date. While these lists don’t get to who are our best “friends” in the service, they address who we care about the most and least. In a SNS, I’d wager that this is as good a notion of friendship as any. This is very powerful data.
Also interesting is looking at personal feeds history for users of the Facebook. You can do this by clicking the “View All” link of each person’s news feed. All of the information they have shared in the Facebook since September (when feeds were introduced) are available to interested parties. This “record” is what I was talking about in my writing on Facebook as an identity archive.
So here’s a question — how many users in Facebook qualify their friendships? That is, how many fill in the “how do you know this person” info? It seems to me that Facebook could use that data as another dimension for filtering information in the feeds. I could say something like “filter out everyone I worked with at XX” or “show lots of info for people I went to school with”. All of this information is (potentially) available.
That is a good question. From what I’ve seen, the qualification of friendship is a cultrually dictated process. On some campuses (and inside groups on these campuses) people qualify at very high levels. On others, people don’t do it as much. However I do think it is a popular enough practice that the situation you describe could be quite useful.
Explanation of the stipends:
$300 travel grants to broke-ass activists and organizers so they can get to the DC rootscamp and participate. *It’s important* — otherwise we’d have all rich kids and established politicos.
“Plenary” pitch:
I didn’t see that that had been added, we nixed it right when Fred brought it to my attention. But now I hear that this has been done at many barcamps.
The “invite-only” thing — i.e. holding spaces open for certain kinds of people — has also been done at many bar camps, I’m coming to learn. It’s just not done openly and transparently. Do Barcamps turn away directors of big companies after they’re full? I bet not. Do they let in the grunts after they’re full? I wonder how often. We’re saving spaces for the grunts.
I think having friend groups is the answer, similar to flickr where you have friends and familiy and you can decide which group sees what. Ideally you should be able to create as many groups as possible and call them what you want e.g. work mates, parents friends etc. Then you should be able give them permissions accordingly e.g. you might not want work mates and parents mates to see your Glastonbury photos. Obviously the reverse of this would be the ability to state you don’t really want to hear absolutely everything about your ‘friends I said hello to once at a party’ group.