Over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated when I load Facebook. My Newsfeed is a cluttered mess of ads, application spam, and despairingly little real information about my friends. I’ve dutifully clicked the thumbs up/thumbs down icons hundreds of times, giving Facebook a decent preference set, but the problem persists. Newsfeed, which used to inspire me as one of the most innovative information spaces, has quickly lost its utility through this signal/noise imbalance.
When I talk to others, they echo my problems. Newsfeed is “spammy”, you have to squint to find real information. Personally, I’ve found that my visits to Facebook are down as a result – each time I log in it sort of feels like I’ve been given an inbox that’s full of spam and I have to sort it. That is not a good feeling. In an effort to improve Newsfeed (and argue the value of such information spaces), I thought I might work through some of the problems of the proposition.
The fundamental proposition of Newsfeed, like a head’s up display, is to project relevant information to the information consumer in a singular place. Implicit in the projection is editorial control, where certain types of information are promoted and others left to their traditional spaces. Relevance should always be the goals of these spaces; if they are not relevant they pose outlying ability to damage the product. If I am wincing every time I log in to Facebook and see a huge list of spam, it is clear that Newsfeed is damaging my impressions of the product as whole. Designers of Newsfeed-type spaces should understand and adapt to this reality.
Of course, the challenge of a Newsfeed is the multidimensional nature of relevance. You may want information about when friends have added new friends, and I may want information about upcoming events. Arguably, we’re all going to want some individual combination, and to that extent Facebook allows one to tune their Newsfeed preferences. The problem with tuning, however, is that Facebook fails to respect my preferences, sending me miscellaneous stories when the system lacks stories that match my preferences. These non-opted-in stories are spam. Imagine this scenario: you set up your RSS reader, and you read all of your feeds and mark them read. Then you update your reader, but there are no new stories. Instead of just telling you this, your RSS reader finds you a bunch of random stories from blogs you aren’t subscribed to. It’s a broken proposition.
Newsfeed was designed to keep you interested, to keep you logging in again and again. Each time you’d be greeted with fresh information. This is a failure of assumption. I recheck my newsreader after I’ve read all my feeds – people will naturally go back to good information sources, even if there isn’t much information there. We’d rather know that there’s none of the information we’re looking for than tons of the information we aren’t.
To add insult to injury, my Newsfeed finds itself increasingly inundated with advertisements, such as my favorite one that urges me to go to dental school (hey, maybe Facebook knows something my brain will only figure out ten years from now). Advertisements in the Newsfeed, be they social or not, are also a failed proposition. First of all, they completely lack context, which my brain involuntarily processes as being the least-important item in the Newsfeed. Second, they compete with “good” information. I’m much more likely to click on pictures of my friends than some random Verizon ad, and that’s just the way it’s always going to be. Finally, they pollute the feed, devaluing the information space. It’s as if Google included sponsored links in their organic search results. Any self-respecting Googler would be horrified at that proposition; yes, it would have been lucrative, but it would completely destroy the trust in that information space.
Unfortunately, Facebook’s already polluted Newsfeed, so I’m not sure the trust/value can be regained. And I’m also pretty sure that they’re not going to change their approach any time soon – this short-term revenue is eclipsing the long-term value of creating a useful information space. That doesn’t stop me from wishing for a revamped Newsfeed, one that followed my rules, acted like my RSS reader, and understood the value of a trusted, relevant information space. If Facebook really is in it for the long haul, the Newsfeed should be a space I enjoy, not one I wince at and try to avoid.
