Facebook news feed redefines personal relationships
In the time before news feed, the Web was a strange, quiet, and probably very lonely place. I say “probably” because I can barely remember the way things worked back then. After Facebook launched news feed, nothing on the Web would ever be the same again.
Get this: Before news feed, which launched seven years ago this month, you could post a picture or some other personal detail somewhere — your Facebook or MySpace or Friendster page, Flickr, Blogger, LiveJournal — and be reasonably sure that it would remain just there, unseen by pretty much everyone you knew. The only way someone might find it is by checking your page. Sure, some people would do that — but everyone had scores of connections online, so no one was checking each of their friends’ pages. The net effect was solitude. In “The Facebook Effect,” David Kirkpatrick’s history of Facebook’s early years, Chris Cox, who’s now the company’s vice president of product, recounts the founding idea for news feed: “The Internet could help you answer a million questions, but not the most important one, the one you wake up with every day: How are the people doing that I care about?”
Looking back, it’s clear that news feed is one of the most influential innovations in the recent history of the Web. News feed forever altered our relationship to personal data, turning everything we do online into a little message for friends or the world to consume. You might not like this trend — or, at least, you might claim you don’t like this trend. But the stats prove you probably do. News feed is the basis for Facebook’s popularity, the thing that initially set it apart from every other social network, and the reason hundreds of millions of us go back to the site every day.
But news feed is bigger than that. Either directly or indirectly, it’s the inspiration for just about every social-media feature that has come along since. News feed paved the way for Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Flipboard and Quora — for every site that thrives off the communities created by lots of people’s individual contributions. News feed changed the media (it’s hard to imagine BuzzFeed without it), advertising, politics and, to the extent that it altered how we all talk to one another, society itself.
Yes, that sounds over-important. But consider this: Thanks to news feed, I learned today that that this one dude I barely knew in high school just had a baby. I know what his half-clothed wife looked like just after labor. I’ve seen his mother-in-law. I’ve seen his infant daughter. Is such forced, daily, crushing intimacy good or bad for the world? None of us can say for sure yet. Either way, though, it’s hugely consequential — because we now know everything about everyone, the way we relate to one another has changed enormously, and permanently.
News feed was born on Sept. 5, 2006. Facebook announced the feature in a short, straightforward blog post that offered no hints of the magnitude of the change coming to the site. At the time, Facebook was still available only to students and others with select email addresses. It had around 10 million active users, meaning it was dwarfed by other social networks, especially MySpace. (Facebook opened itself up to everyone later that September.)
“News Feed ... updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again,” Ruchi Sanghvi, then a Facebook product manager, wrote in the announcement. By bringing everyone’s news to you, Facebook’s engineers reasoned, news feed would make Facebook much easier to use. Sanghvi added: “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”
By turning a series of lonely events into something like a story — by combining all your friends’ actions into a community, or even a conversation, on your home page — news feed gave Facebook a soul. Thanks to news feed, people started finding one another and working together in ways that had never happened on the site before. “Before news feed, you could join groups, but discovering them was not super easy,” Cox explained at a recent Facebook press event. “Within a period of two weeks after the news feed launch we had the first group with over a million people — which means a million people had seen the group and taken an action to join it.” There’s a punch line to this story that’s a testament to our enduring ambivalence about news feed. The first Facebook group that news feed propelled to million-plus membership was a protest against News Feed.
One critique of news feed is that it has turned us all into narcissists, and worse, that it’s making us depressed about how much better everyone else’s life is. The trouble with that critique is that News Feed is only a reflection of your own interaction with it: If it’s serving up stuff that makes you sad, it’s only because that’s the stuff you’re most engaged with. If it’s true that news feed drives us crazy, we theoretically have the power to fix it. The news feed we have is the news feed we deserve.
Ÿ Manjoo is author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” Twitter: @fmanjoo