Mobilized by SC Moatti

Author:SC Moatti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2016-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Building Facebook and Yelp for Meaning

Let’s look at how Facebook uses internal filters to personalize the experience of the most adept users.

Seasoned Facebook users tend to have more friends than average and as a result, there is a lot of content for them to browse, from profiles to pictures, posts, pages, and more. Most of the time, they will rely on the News Feed feature to give them a snapshot of what’s most relevant right here, right now.

When I worked at Facebook, I sat a few desks away from the team that was in control of the settings and parameters of the News Feed. One of its charges was to develop internal filters to better personalize the experience of Facebook users.

It is hard to imagine a more complex task than making sense of thousands of rankings and preferences in real time. But instead of monopolizing control of the process, the News Feed team made the deliberate choice to give users direct access to internal filters so that they could control the content of their own News Feed.

The Facebook team realized that advanced users wanted more than just better controls and settings, or a fancier News Feed. They wanted their voices heard. This is why internally they are called content producers, in contrast with less sophisticated users who consume content instead of producing it.

An average user may not notice this, but experienced users craft their Facebook posts to make sure they reach exactly whom they’re intended for. They often create multiple groups of friends based on shared interests or locations. They even have the ability to give those groups names: “amateur chess club,” or “Sally’s birthday bash,” or “San Francisco hikers.”

Facebook doesn’t try to get the content producers to do anything new. It simply makes it easy for them to share the things that matter to them with their community.

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