One of the biggest issues Facebook users raised about the changes to the news feed introduced six weeks ago was the most recent stories not appearing at the top. Now, the social network has brought back that option. Sort of.
Facebook Engineering Manager Mark Tonkelowitz announced in a blog post that users can opt to see the most recent stories first — which was how the news feed displayed things previously.
Facebook took a year to develop the advanced profile currently called timeline, but I see it as part of a much longer evolution — dating back to Vannevar Bush’s Memex vision from the 1950s.
The Memex was a hypothetical machine that would record everything; now Facebook stands to be the first realized version of the Memex, recording everything (well almost) and allowing us near-instant recall of the minutest details of our lives—or at least the ones we posted on Facebook.
Beware: The socialbots are coming. These fake profiles mimic real people on Facebook but are actually computer programs that try to harvest private data from users, and expose them to other security risks.
University of British Columbia researchers created a social network of a single botmaster and 102 socialbots, and then let it loose on Facebook for eight weeks. The results were a little scary.
Marketers say they worry the most about how to achieve a return on investment in Facebook, along with how to create two-way dialogues.
Those two worries surfaced in a survey of social media professionals conducted by Shoutlet, which summed up the findings in an infographic (the second one we’ve seen today with a Halloween theme).
Facebook and Google seem to be in an all-out war to see which company can come up with the best energy efficiency solutions for power-gobbling data centers. This round probably goes to Facebook, which just announced two new green data center strategies on two distinct tracks. One is the use of ambient air and renewable energy to power its own data centers, and the other is an open-source project to improve the energy efficiency of computer hardware across the board.
Facebook’s altered news feed may benefit pages with 100,000 fans or more, while harming those with fewer than 1,000 fans.
EdgeRank Checker analyzed more than 600 Facebook brand pages that were active during two time periods — August 19 through September 16, prior to the debut of news feed, and September 23 to October 21 — and found that likes and comments
The tracker of fan engagement found that pages with over 100,000 fans or more had a 27.8 percent increase in likes and comments as a result of the altered news feed, while pages with 10,000 to 100,000 fans had an 8.76 percent gain.
The number of places where you can get tagged on Facebook continues to grow, but you can give yourself the right to approve all tags before they can appear on the site — and the ability to do this has gotten more refined than ever.
There are actually five different options you can enable that together limit whether anyone’s effort to tag you can go live on the site.
When Facebook implemented smart friend lists, their editing controls moved — to the left-hand column of the homepage, along with the top right of your friends’ profiles.
Techie types would call that location “inline,” referring to the fact that the settings no longer reside in a single area.
Facebook pages are losing reviews and discussion tabs at the end of the month, but photos posted to walls will be larger — and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether these changes are hints that a page version of timeline is just around the corner.
The official subsite for Facebook pages now says, “To make Facebook Pages more consistent with recent changes made to the site, we’ve made all photos posted on the wall of a page larger. You can see what this looks like when you visit any page on Facebook.”
And administrators now see warning banners about the removals, stating: “The best way to encourage conversation and feedback is through posts and comments on your wall. To focus on this, we’ll be removing the reviews app October 31.” (more…)
We’re seeing the tip of the proverbial iceberg in spinoffs from the like button, as Facebook allows the addition of more verbs describing the relationship between persons, places and things on the social network.
But the verb that users want the most remains anathema to advertisers and therefore to Facebook itself: dislike.
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