NEW YORK: Facebook acknowledges that it cannot guess who your best friends are. The multibillion-dollar social network made the admission this morning as it announced changes that will hand back some control to users.
FEMALE FRIENDLY: Facebook puts women on its front page for the first time
DIGITAL DETOX: Zuckerberg says we need to go offline occasionally
The changes will allow Facebook members to choose which of their friends and interests they want to see prioritised in their News Feed, and to “unfollow” or hide friends who they no longer find interesting.
Previously, Facebook has decided which posts will appear in a user’s scrolling home page using a computer algorithm to display the most popular updates.
But Facebook’s software decisions about what users most want to see have not always been popular themselves, with friends’ posts sometimes appearing days after they were first made or not at all.
Many Facebook users also protested the removal of a default chronological News Feed, with the network only delivering it as an option that can be selected from a side menu.
Facebook News Feed product management director Adam Mosseri told Time magazine its “most recent” timeline feature was better as an option only – rather than a default setting because “if everyone was on chronological all the time, people would miss a lot more important content”.
Facebook’s new options, when launched, will be accessible in its side menu by selecting News Feed Preferences.
In that menu, users will be able to select friends and pages to prioritise, make difficult decisions about who to unfollow (which will hide updates) and see whose posts they viewed most over the last week.
Facebook will also suggest pages users may like to follow based on their existing interests.
The new updates will be made available to Australian users today on Apple iOS devices, however those using Google Android-based smartphones and tablets, and viewing Facebook on the web, will have to wait longer.
A spokesman said the updates would arrive for those users “over the coming weeks”.
