Facebook releases the sort of information flow: releasing new features

Sina Science and technology news Beijing time August 7 morning, Facebook held a press conference in Tuesday, disclosed the news Feed information flow of the post sorting and display methods. In addition, the company announced several new features to help users find content. Facebook has never publicly discussed how content is sorted before. The company said in Tuesday that Facebook users already had the "Groups" and "events" feature to participate in the news feed, but could not aggregate all the content in the community. At present, the company has at least 15 employees specializing in the content of the news feed sequencing, so that its effect to maximize. Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager responsible for news feed sequencing, said the average user Lasse Beixtrom 1500 messages a day. Facebook takes a holistic view of everything and then determines the relevance of the content to the user and gives a corresponding rating. Then, when the news feed content is aggregated, all information is sorted according to the score, high on the top, and low on the bottom. When it comes to fractional computing, Kostrom says, if it's a recent post, Facebook will use algorithms to determine how the content is related to the user, how many comments it attracts, how much "awesome" it is, and then the overall rating. Beixtrom says Facebook has been improving its algorithm and using a/b test to assess its effectiveness before it is launched for all users. He also said the team would meet every week to discuss how to improve the results. In addition to disclosing the way news feeds are sorted, the company also made some revisions to news feeds in Tuesday, all of which are related to organic content, not paid ads. Story bumping every time a user opens the news feed, Facebook looks at all the new posts and then scores them. But in this model, it is difficult for users to access old content, so the company plans to improve the situation to some extent. Instead of just putting all the new content at the top of the news feed, Facebook will be at the top of the new content for the user. The company said: "When users load Facebook in the morning, a limited number of messages appear on the screen." They can scroll through the screen to see more content, but it's hard to ignore something before leaving. Story bumping can guarantee that when users log on to Facebook later in the day, some of the unread messages will appear at the top of the news feed along with the messages released thereafter. "For example, an ordinary friend of the user posted a good message at 8 in the morning, but the user looked at the news feed stream and didn't read the message because the rank was too strong." In this case, although the message was released earlier, Facebook recognizedFor: "Because you haven't read it, it's new news for you." "So when the user looks at the news feed one or two hours later, the message is eligible to" bulge "to the top. However, not all unread content is "raised" to the top, and only unread information related to the user will enjoy this treatment. Beixtrom said: "After we build this service, we can track what the user specifically saw." He stressed that this is not a simple upgrade, but rather a relatively large infrastructure adjustment. In a A/b test during the development process, the company found that the model could boost "praise", comment and share 5%, and the interaction from pages would grow by 8%. In addition, the proportion of users reading content increased from 57% to 70%. The amount of information displayed in the news feed is not affected by the story bumping function, Beixtrom said. This feature is first oriented to Web publishing and will then be added to the mobile version. Last actor this new feature will better track people who have recently interacted with users. Facebook says the new feature can take into account recent user conversations and recent events. The Facebook algorithm tracks the user's last 50 interactions, including "praise", comments, and sharing, and then takes this as a reference to sort the information, providing a higher weighting for those who have just interacted. For example, if a user "praises" or comments on what a colleague or friend is publishing, Facebook will provide a higher weighting for the news feed sort. In addition, Facebook is also developing a feature called chronological by actor, which publishes the person's content in chronological order against a friend that the user has just interacted with. But Facebook said the feature was less participatory. (Ding Macro)