Facebook on its Clutter Conundrum - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Evelyn M. Rusli This week's redesign of Facebook's news feed reveals just how complex the problem of solving clutter has become for the giant social network. The makeover, unveiled Thursday, gives users the power to drill down into slices of their feed, such as all the activity from their friends, or the pages they follow, or to simply see all the real-time content available to a user. It also features a more minimal design, as Facebook attempts to manage a growing mountain of data while serving the disparate interests of its users, advertisers and developers. For roughly a year, the problem of balancing all of that has fallen on the shoulders of Will Cathcart, Facebook's lead product manager for news feed. Every day, Mr. Cathcart and his team must keep the clutter at bay. His news feed team includes a group of roughly a dozen engineers who closely monitor the news feed algorithm, called EdgeRank, which determines what pieces of content a user sees and in what order. It addresses hundreds of variables for each user, such as how many times someone has liked certain kinds of posts or how a user interacts with a specific publisher. The group of engineers frequently makes small tweaks, usually on a weekly basis, and are constantly running experiments to test possible changes to the algorithm. Because changes to the algorithm affect Facebook's primary channel to consumers, the group works with various parts of the company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg usually makes the big decisions. Mr. Cathcart's team sits at the center of the debate of how Facebook should craft the user experience, while also trying to be a public company that answers to shareholders. Although Facebook has said it is pushing the most "relevant blend" of stories into a users' news feed, that feed increasingly has more ads, which naturally reduces the number of posts a user sees from their friends and the pages she or he follows. According to Mr. Cathcart, the placement of ads on the news feed is not determined by the main algorithm. Instead, ads are automatically inserted after a certain number of posts. Which ads a user sees is determined by a separate algorithm, which takes into account how much an advertiser was willing to pay to serve that ad and the taste profile of the user. Mr. Cathcart's team has been under fire since last fall, when Facebook released a major change to its algorithm in a bid to throttle spam. Spam complaints sharply dropped, according to the company, but it also spurred criticism from business owners and publishers, who reported that their reach–or the number of users who saw their posts—-plunged. Many accused Facebook of manipulating its algorithm to make room for new ads and to push businesses to buy more ads. Mr. Cathcart acknowledges that maintaining the balance on news feed between ads and user-generated content is an ongoing challenge. Facebook recently completed a study to determine what impact ads had on user activity, or engagement. One group, comprised of millions of users, saw the normal flow of ads. Meanwhile a second group, also made up of millions of users, saw no ads. According to Mr. Cathcart, the study showed a 2% drop in engagement for the group that saw the normal flow of ads versus the group that saw no ads. Any drop in engagement should upset Facebook, given its loftier mission of connecting the world on its platform. But all things considered, Mr. Cathcart said, it really wasn't so bad. "The impact of ads is very small," he said. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNF3eK1E2uz1hgw1Zzwrni6RW9XPFQ&url=http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/08/facebook-on-its-clutter-conundrum/

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