10 Years of the Facebook newsfeed
The industry media has been abuzz with stories about the tenth anniversary of Facebook’s newsfeed. The Drum asked for my comment…
Life before the news feed? Most people can’t remember. With only 8M users at the time, most people weren’t on Facebook. Many that were, complained of the intrusive nature of the aggregated personal moments, but that was soon forgotten, usage exploded and we all got on with liking and poking each other.
Since then Zuckerberg’s team has adopted iterative design, evolving the news feed in such a way that most users don’t notice. An incredible feat when you consider how many times we interact with it per day. Always improving and always looking to improve the content it sucks in, penalizing clickbate, promoting video. But what do we now have? What was once a stream of friends’ activities is now a stream of shared commercial content. Facebook is for friends brands.
As laughable as it may seem, Facebook is ripe for disruption. Unfortunately, as soon as it comes along, Facebook buys or mimics the disruptors. However, nothing in digital is invincible.
