Some time ago, I posted on the need to look deeper at Facebook, as potentially the most important engine through which consumer applications and advertising get discovered. Since then we’ve seen the rise of the dialog on the Social Graph, and we’ve seen FB’s rumored valuation “validated”.
For those who are still scratching their heads about this, and think of Facebook as “yet another social site”, do check out this article. Inside Facebook provides some eye-opening statistics on the way Facebook determines what shows up in your News Feed.
Notable Quotes:
According to Facebook, News Feed publishes just a little more than 0.2% of the stories it considers. This means that of the 1.2 trillion story candidates Facebook considers every day, only 2.4 billion get published in users’ News Feeds. And on a per user basis, that means each user sees only 60 out of about 30,000 possible story candidates on any given day.
This is a Big Deal - the News Feed has quietly revolutionized the way information flows across the social graph. The quality at which it quietly functions is truly a landmark technical achievement, and Facebook users vote with their feet: 50% log in every day.
The writer astutely highlights the challenge in this approach - balancing the user value in harnessing and packaging an incredible volume of socially-connected information, with what the author views as restrictive publishing that stifles viral development (an editorial “amen!” to that comment).
Hmmm, sounds like a consumer relevance vs. ad model dynamic in formation. All derived from a level of scaled data mining on previously uncollected information that we have never before witnessed. Where have we seen that before?
The News Feed has emerged as the single most important dimension of Facebook - it’s the personification of the social graph. As the Inside Facebook writer puts it, it may well become the “Most Important Way Information Spreads”.
When you get this kind of glimpse inside, you start to see what all the fuss is about.
