Mark Zuckerberg spoke on Facebook Live on Tuesday about the launch of 'News Feed' 10 years ago and... [+]
Zuckerberg streamed a Facebook Live video from the company's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters, joined by most of Facebook's original news feed team -- chief product officer Chris Cox, former Facebook product manager Ruchi Sanghvi, VP of ads and business platform Andrew Bosworth and VP of engineering Kang-Xing Jin.
"It was a really big change that now we take for granted in the product," Zuckerberg said in the live stream. "At the time, nothing like that existed in the world. It has not only changed the way people think about and use Facebook today, but in a lot of ways it changed the whole industry."
"It ended up being such a basic idea of how people wanted to stay in touch on social products -- now, basically every major social app today has its own equivalent of news feed," Zuckerberg added.
Although at a Q&A session in Rome in August, Zuckerberg said emphatically that Facebook is not a media organization, several members of the founding news feed team described the feature as a "personalized newspaper" in Tuesday's live stream. Facebook made tweaks to its news feed algorithm earlier this summer to prioritize posts from friends and family. However, news feed frequently serves up articles to users, and Facebook curates a list of "Trending Topics," featured prominently alongside the news feed. Facebook has come under scrutiny in recent months over how it determines which stories and publications to highlight, and for mishaps in "Trending Topics," which have at times featured fake or click bait stories.
"It's a really big AI problem -- what is most important to a person?" Zuckerberg said, describing news feed as one of the most advanced technical systems the company has built to date. The company said it uses an algorithm to show each user about 200 posts per day out of several thousand available articles, status updates, photos and videos. "There's a lot more work to do."
Zuckerberg also posted separately on Facebook about how news feed has helped people consume more diverse perspectives.
"One of the things we’re really proud of at Facebook is that, whatever your political views, you probably have some friends who are in the other camp," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. "You probably have some friends who practice different religions -- or who come from different countries. In Europe, for example, the average person on Facebook has more than 50 friends from outside their own country."
"That means whatever TV station you might watch or whatever newspaper you might read, on Facebook you're hearing from a broader set of people than you would have otherwise," he continued.
Zuckerberg said news feed makes it easier for people to consider more media sources than ever before, and that he thinks "a lot" about how to promote a "plurality of opinions" on the social network.
Before news feed, users needed to individually visit friends' profiles in order to see their updates, and the Facebook "homepage" was largely limited to a tally of the number of pokes and messages the user had received. Despite this, the initial launch of news feed was met with extreme backlash from many of Facebook's then 10 million users. When news feed went live late one night, early Facebook employees started popping champagne to celebrate a feature that was nine months in the making, only to wake up to scores of angry messages and disgruntled feedback the next morning. About 10% of users threatened to leave the social network or boycott the feature, Sanghvi said in the live stream, and Facebook groups formed to call for its end. Some users even protested outside of Facebook's office.
But the company noticed that with news feed, users were twice as engaged and also started forming large Facebook groups, with as many as 10% of the network's total users. Now, one of the biggest areas of focus for the news feed team is video, the company said, from 360 video to live streaming.
"Video has become a lot of what you're doing on your feed," said chief product officer Cox. "Live has been exploding, and there are lots of new features we're adding there."
Zuckerberg noted that video isn't the stopping point. Tools and expression on Facebook will continue to become more visual and immersive over time, he said, and eventually headsets will be widely used to experience the app in virtual reality.
"Tech doesn't end," Zuckerberg said. "There's always another platform to express yourself more richly. We view that as our job -- chase the next thing and give people better and better tools to more accurately express what they're experiencing and feeling."
