Facebook's quest to be
a personalized newspaper for the Internet age continued on Tuesday with tweaks
aimed at making sure members spy hot stories from their friends.
Changes to the leading
social network's formula for figuring out which posts will be of interest
included "bumping" up potentially intriguing stories that went
unnoticed during prior visits to Facebook.
"It is hard for
users to get back to old things; you have to scroll through things you have
already seen," Facebook news feed team engineering Lars Backstrom said
while discussing the latest changes.
"We wanted to
make it so people weren't missing important stories that didn't make top slots
but were just below the fold."
Signals weighed in the
machine learning algorithm were modified to bump-up a story considered more
interesting than fresher material that formerly got priori
ty simply for being
newer.
"We tweaked the
model," Backstrom said, noting that about 30,000 signals are balanced in
the algorithm.
"Instead of just
taking the new stories, we would take all stories that were new to you, that
you haven't seen, even if it isn't the freshest."
A test of the change
showed that the number of stories people read in news feeds rose to 70 percent
from 57 percent with "bumping," according to Facebook.
"Story Bumping is
going to be a really nice tool for people if they are sitting with a Facebook
account and have run out of things to look at," said Facebook vice president
of product Chris Cox. "It will bump up new stuff."
News feeds were also
modified to take into account the "last actor" a member interacted
with and then give that friend's posts temporary priority since they seem to be
up to something interesting.
"We wanted to
capture your current state of mind as you were using Facebook," Backstrom
said.
"A lot of signals
are long term, such as the relationship with each friend; we wanted a real time
factor."
Facebook's ranking
software assigns numerical scores to the roughly 1,500 stories typically
eligible for delivery to a member's news feed and displays the top 300.
Powerful factors for
ranking are relationships, along with how often a member comments, shares,
"likes," or otherwise acts on posts of friends. Hiding posts sinks
content from that person in news feed rankings.
"Our goal is to
create the best personalized newspaper for each of our readers," Backstrom
said.
Facebook engineers are
experimenting with ways for News Feeds to better handle chronological posts,
such as a friend firing off play-by-play updates from a sporting event.
Backstrom's team meets
each Tuesday to brainstorm ways to improve the Facebook news feed, with
worthwhile ideas tested internally among workers or with a tiny fraction of the
social network's more than one billion members.
"It starts with
intuition and then that gets written into code as a feature," said Cox.
"Then we look at interactions."
Ads displayed as
promoted posts in news feeds are handled separately from content generated by
people's friends or family members at Facebook, according to the ranking team.
"We figure out
the most relevant news feed with the organic content, and then, as a newspaper
or television program might do, we create advertising slots," said
Facebook product manager Will Cathcart.
Backstrom compared the
job of ranking news feed posts to the challenge faced by Internet search
engines Google or Bing when it comes to quickly determining optimal results for
queries.
"Facebook is one
of the only places where you have a problem on the same scale as what Google or
Bing is doing but you have to use different techniques because of the personal
aspects of it," Backstrom said.
No comments:
Post a Comment