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Facebook adds feeds to profile pages and home page
September 5th, 2006
| By Justin Smith | 5 Comments » |
Last night Facebook launched two new features: Mini Feed and News Feed. While News Feed is getting most of the attention, I think Mini Feed is the bigger change in the Facebook product.
With this update, Mini Feed supplants Personal Information as the dominant module on the profile page. “Personal Information” has historically been the hallmark value-add of Facebook for college students who want to “research” new people they meet a little more. This update prioritizes the friend-monitoring functionality of Mini Feed (and News Feed, which is just an aggregation of your friends’ Mini Feeds) above the research/stalking functionality of Personal Information.
I personally think people will vote with their attention and love this feature. Social dashboards were one of the most popular features we implemented at Standpoint, and I’m glad to see I now get a Facebook friend stream. However, sadly, the feed is not available in RSS, but only accessible within Facebook.com.
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September 5th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
[...] It also encourages you to visit the site regularly to see this news – some of which could be very time critical, like your friends writing a note asking for something, or a change in relationship status. This way Facebook has finally delivered the “notify me when (insert hot chick or dude) has a relationship status change”, just by friending them. Some people lament that this isn’t available via RSS. FB obviously wants to use this to increase activity across it’s entire site, and also the content is more rich (including news “types” and leading images) than just the typical headlines sent to an rss reader. [...]
September 5th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Feed won’t become RSS available anytime soon. The company obviously would like to use this to encourage more frequent user visits, and to redirect those extra visits to other areas of the site, to increase overall stickyness.
Also the feed as shown on the site is more rich than just a stream of content titles, including “types” and images.
September 5th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
The reaction has decidedly NOT been love. Dozens of “Mini Feed Must Die” facebook groups have sprung up, and blog posts and discussion, at least among my group of friends, has all been decidedly negative.
TMI, and too easily accessible. True, none of the information is new, but these features make it TOO easy to get it.
At the very least there needs to be options to disable, restrict, and control what get’s published and seen on these feeds.
September 6th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
This new feature is to facebook what “New Coke” was to Coke. People hate it. It makes them feel even more stalked than before. It is a disaster.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
[...] will users react? When Facebook originally launched the News Feed for the first time in September 2006, users initially responded in a roar of protest, only to stop shortly later after realizing the [...]