Networks

Facebook’s Transition to News Feed And Search Engine

Facebook, one of the biggest online social network platforms, is now changing the way we use social media. In recent months, Facebook has been rolling out multiple changes to its functions, such as the Instant Articles features, the Google Now-style cards on notification tabs, and universal search bar.

In the past, readers interested in specific news would have to either google the topic, go straight to their saved favorite news site links, or open a separate app/site to scroll through the list of the most recent news articles. Now, Facebook has optimized the page load speed of news article to “an average of 8 seconds” per page with its newly added-on Instant Article feature in our app News Feed. This feature not only minimized page load speed, but also increased the convenience scores of the Facebook News Feed to something that not only can lead us to shared posts from our social network but also news outside of such network. Since this summer, “the analytics company Parsely” has already “confirmed that Facebook now directs more traffic to news sites than Google.”

In fact, Facebook is even adding on Google Now-style cards that can introduce us to not only news stories, but also “updates about [our] favorite sports teams, TV shows, [and] the weather” using personalized information from your Facebook profile. Features like movies in theaters and nearby restaurants will also be a part of the new feed. So far, Facebook is still underdeveloped in its personalization, as it resigns to users’ “likes” to determine things like the sports team scores we may be interested in seeing. Therefore, Facebook is risking making the previously more personalized news feed source from our social network into something more noisy and irrelevant.

 

Facebook has not only added features of personalized news, but also indexed its billions of stored posts from users to be more searchable by every user using the Facebook search bar. The added feature makes the search bar a very broad function that could potentially let us see into discussions and news in real time. With the world’s conversations indexed, any topics can be viewed and joined in discussion by anyone. This Facebook feature directly challenges the newly launched Twitter feature Moments, by allowing users to simply use the Facebook search bar to find “everyone’s perspective in one place about a topic you care about”.

With Facebook’s newly added features, our future source of news and information may be changing its directions. Facebook as a whole may be slowly evolving into something that may very well be used as an interactive search engine, constantly changing based on the reactions of people in the world.

 

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/72-hours-with-facebook-instant-articles/412171/

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/26/9617282/facebook-notifications-tab-google-now

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9587122/new-facebook-search-all-public-posts

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