Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ChrisMac 6292 days ago
I'm not a huge Facebook user, but I don't get what the big deal with the change is. They just made the news feed a little more prominent. The older design from a few weeks ago emphasized that already.

Whenever I logged on, that was the main thing I checked anyways - updates about what my friends were up to.

If anything, I think it's good. It'll give me more opportunity to keep in touch with people in little ways hear and there.
1 comments
cos 6292 days ago
They've done a lot more than that. Most significantly:

1. There is no more news feed, they've eliminated it! What you now see on the homepage is basically a "status update feed". While they've enhanced status updates so that they now combine the former share/post functionality, every other kind of action that used to go in the news feed is no longer there. This has a lot of corrolaries. For example:

2. Apps can no longer be viral. When you take an action in an app that causes it to post to your profile wall, that action will not appear on your friends' homepages, so they won't see it unless they go looking for it.

... the same is true for other things: For example, when someone tags a photo of one of your friends, you'll no longer see that on your homepage. You'll only be notified of the new photos if the person who posted the photos is your friend.

There are a lot of other bad changes and features removed, but that's probably the biggest problem.

link
unalone 6292 days ago
There is no more news feed, they've eliminated it! What you now see on the homepage is basically a "status update feed". While they've enhanced status updates so that they now combine the former share/post functionality, every other kind of action that used to go in the news feed is no longer there.

That's not true at all. Apps still publish to the feed. That's how I found out about this Facebook poll: it published an update to my feed.

Furthermore, the Highlights on the side is the exact same as the old feed. You get app updates there as well.

... the same is true for other things: For example, when someone tags a photo of one of your friends, you'll no longer see that on your homepage. You'll only be notified of the new photos if the person who posted the photos is your friend.

Again not true. I get tagged photo updates on my main feed.

I understand the Facebook change dislike, because people hate big changes, but people are just blindly making things up now.

link
grag 6292 days ago
#2 is not true. Stories posted automatically via the API won't show up in friend's newsfeeds. But apps can popup a "feed form" which allows users to preview the content the app wants to post to their wall (this can include an image or embedded swf). If the users posts it then that content will show up in all their friend's newsfeeds. I think this format is actually much better for apps.
link
cos 6292 days ago
It's possible (though not very likely IMO) that that could turn out to be "much better" once app writers adapt their apps to it, and people get used to it. In the meantime, though, the viral aspect of apps was based on publishing actions people take, as a side-effect of people taking those actions, and that just isn't happening now. You do NOT see this stuff on your homepage anymore.

As I pointed out, it's not just apps. Photo tagging, friending, and a host of other Facebook actions that used to be viral aren't anymore.

link
blader 6292 days ago
The implicit news feed stories were never really a strong source of virality. Our current data is showing that the new stream is performing quite a bit better for us, but YMMV.
link
cos 6290 days ago
"performing" in what sense?

If someone joins a group, for example, I'm much less likely to see that, whereas before I might've looked at the group based on the title. If someone adds a friend who I know, I probably won't notice now, whereas before I might've seen it and added that friend. These kinds of things are valuable for social networking.

What kind of performance are you measuring, and why does it matter more than other kinds?

link
blader 6290 days ago
I was speaking as a Facebook application developer responding to the comment about "applications can no longer be viral". I have no idea whether it's working out for Facebook as a whole, but for our own purposes it's looking very good across a whole range of metrics, mostly growth (user acquisition and activation).

As a data point, these guys: http://apps.facebook.com/livingsocial managed to get around 2 million uniques over the past couple of days, mostly from Feed virality. Again I have no idea if it's good for Facebook as a whole (and the only people who can say for sure are people with access to that data at Facebook), but for application developers it's been great.

link