Facebook Shows Users More Content Which Doesn’t Come From Your Friends – TechCrunch (Apr 3, 2017)

Almost exactly two months ago, I wrote in my Techpinions column that Facebook’s next big opportunity was finally stepping beyond the idea of showing users only content shared by their friends, and using AI and machine learning to show them other content like content they’d previously engaged with. Doing this, I said, would dramatically expand the amount of interesting content that could be shown to users, thereby keeping them on the service for longer, and giving Facebook more time and places to show ads. And as I wrote almost exactly a year ago, this is just another consequence of Facebook becoming less of a social network and more of a content hub. Today, we’re seeing Facebook not only roll out a video tab (and a video app for TVs) with suggested videos, but also now testing a dedicated tab for recommended content of all kinds in its apps. This is yet another extension of Facebook’s increasing absorption of activity from across users’ lives into its various apps in an attempt to capture more of users’ time and advertisers’ dollars, and I suspect it’ll work pretty well if it’s managed right. Of course, it’s demonstrated several times lately that it’s somewhat lost its touch in that department, so it will need to proceed carefully in pushing forward in this area to avoid alienating users.

via TechCrunch


The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

Vote for or share this post

Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.