Facebook CEO Talks Of News Feed At Its Tenth Anniversary

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Facebook launched the News Feed ten years ago on September 6. Since its launch, this algorithmic social timeline has become an essential part of the Facebook experience. Speaking of this revolutionary invention, CEO Mark Zuckerberg got a bit sentimental, notes Digital Trends.

News Feed is a big part of Facebook

Zuckerberg, who has 78 million followers on FB, shared a flurry of public posts to celebrate his firm’s most advanced creation on the tenth anniversary of the News Feed. He began with sharing an “On This Day” Facebook memory that contained a photo of the original team that helped create the News Feed. Many of them later joined Zuckerberg for a live-stream, according to the report.

Zuckerberg referred to the feature’s invention as one of his “favorite stories from Facebook’s history” and recalled how different the social network looked when there were just 10 million users. Facebook now has more than a billion users, and News Feed has become an integral part of its success over the past ten years.

News Feed is one of the most advanced systems it has built, wrote the CEO. It takes into consideration everything that friends of over 1 billion people post every day and also all the media content a user might be interested in. From all the content, it sorts out what users will find most important.

“Nothing like it has ever been built before,” Zuckerberg noted.

The bigger the risk, greater the return

At the time of FB’s launch in 2004, each user had a profile page but didn’t have a central place for updates to be organized.

“At the beginning of Facebook, there was no News Feed. For more than two years, Facebook was just a collection of profiles…There was no way to see updates from all your friends or be sure they saw yours,” Zuckerberg wrote.

He believes that in order to win big, you have to take big risks as well. Even News Feeds did not win over users initially, and more than a million people protested the feature, threatening to quit if it wasn’t changed back. The protesters even went on the street outside Facebook’s office demanding the change, Zuckerberg recalled.

Facebook’s product lead, Chris Cox, said he remembers the time he sneaked out the back door of the Facebook offices to avoid the protests. Despite the resistance, Zuckerberg’s team pushed forward with the change, of which he is proud, and now, the News Feed has become central to the social media experience.

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