I think it’s safe to say that at this point there is still certainly room for improvement with regards to Facebook’s news feed. I for one almost never go on it because every time I happen to stumble back to it I find that there is rarely something of interest at the top and so I give up and do something else. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I’m a 25 year old young professional, in other words, Facebook’s bread and butter because, me — and all of my friends — are exactly who advertisers want to shout at. But in speaking with a lot of my friends they either ignore their Facebook newsfeed or go on it only to be extremely frustrated with the content they find about subjects that either upset them or are of little interest. To many friends, Facebook is a way to retain ties with a disparate group of acquaintances and nothing more. It makes me skeptical of the value of Facebook’s “1 billion users per day”.
For Facebook to be relevant in the eyes of users (and resultantly advertisers), people need to spend time on the site and the news feed is a surefire way of keeping them there. One thought that I had is that from what I understand, Facebook’s primary way of vetting and rating content on your feed is “people-based”. I can manually choose who I want to hear from and Facebook’s algorithm pushes content from friends that I frequently interact with. But that’s a flawed system in my opinion. A former classmate of mine that I wouldn’t think to follow or haven’t interacted with in a long time may have posted a really great article that I’d be very interested in. Or a past acquaintance may be attending a very cool event that I’d like to hear about. Which got me thinking: why not employ the same method that Flipboard uses? Why not allow me to select as many topics or tags as I want which could range from “baby photos” to “the Middle East”? This would require Facebook to find a way to categorize and classify everyone’s posts but they may already do that and if they don’t they’re a smart bunch, I’m sure they can figure it out. To make it simple, I guess what I’m saying is that Facebook’s feed should be more “topic-based” and less “person-based” because I believe that it would provide users with much more relevant content, keeping them on Facebook for longer periods of time.