Facebook News Feed is a Robot. It is a machine. It continually gets smarter. It has the computing power of NASA. It is like the terminator. It never stops. This is a good thing.

The facebook news feed is one of several secret sauces that make facebook what it is today. Facebook just announced a few hours ago that the news feed is getting smarter and is changing. I think this will ultimately be for the better of all users.

The facebook news feed is the river of data of my friends behaviors and actions that flows by me as I sit on the banks and relax. I don’t have to do any work. The robot does it for me.

Direct Quote from Facebook “We are going to start taking the quality of the linked content into account when deciding whether or not a newsfeed story gets published. If a story links to pages that have good content easily accessible to the user, then we may promote the story. If the story just redirects the user to a page to add the application, we will be much less likely to show the story. We recommend you avoid placing the content linked from feed stories behind a “require_add” wall. We will probably start experimenting with different ways to make use of the data about requiring install over the next few weeks.”

What does this really mean? It means that the news feed will become less polluted with action from applications that make you install the app to use it. This means that some of the content from within applications might soon be available to users without the users having to actually install the app to see it. (I will share some additional facebook news feed implications & insights in a future post on Facebook Feed Ranking)

This will take some determined programming changes from facebook application developers and some rethinking of facebook strategy for how applications should engage users with useful information or content without them having to add the application.

Little know factoids about facebook news feed (this data is almost a year old so you can multiply the numbers by 3-4 times): With 17 million users on Facebook there are over 2 billion friend connections and over 5 billion actions taken every hour. That means News Feed is processing 1.4 million new user actions and 12 million previously unpublished stories every second to find just the best 13,000 stories to give our users or the top 0.1% of all possible stories.

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