04.26.14

Why Facebook prefers Top Stories to Most Recent

Posted in Media, Web at 6 am

When using Facebook on the web or via custom clients, users see a primary stream of news/posts/updates/whathaveyou. There are a few ways to filter and sort the stream. The original way was simply Most Recent. However for the last couple of years the default has become Top Stories.

This shows the split between two types of Facebook usage: those who have Friended/Liked/etc lots of things/people/groups because “Facebook is the Internet” and those (of us) who use it to connect with a select number of people. The former have a firehose of items that cannot be read entirely and must be curated/culled, the later are trying to keep up with every single post from a handful of friends and family.

Guess which group sees more ads, clicks more ad/sponsored stories, spend more time in the ecosystem, are more “invested” in the platform, and are more profitable for FB? That’s the group FB is supporting, if they are smart.

The rest of us aren’t catered to, yet.

5 Comments »

  1. Jock Murphy said,

    04.26.14 at 12 am

    If you told me that facebook had a system of industrial robots that scattered chicken entrails; took a picture of them; and then used custom written computer vision software to apply ancient sumerian divination techniques that were then cross referenced against indian horoscopes, and a monte carlo simulation feed by random numbers generated by shining xenon lights though lava lamps — all in an attempt to order stories in a way that is almost, but not quite, completely unlike anything I would like…

  2. Jennifer Jones said,

    04.26.14 at 2 am

    What he said 🙂

  3. Jeremy Bailin said,

    03.12.15 at 8 am

    Jeremy Bailin liked this on Facebook.

  4. Jock Murphy said,

    03.12.15 at 8 am

    Jock Murphy liked this on Facebook.

  5. Eli Castillo said,

    03.12.15 at 8 am

    Eli Castillo liked this on Facebook.

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