Facebook is testing a new feature which will let users greatly improve their experience on the world’s largest social network. It has already tweaked News Feed multiple times to ensure that users are shown content that they care about the most, but still there’s room for improvement. The company is now conducting a new test under which it allows select users to curate their own News Feed. It’s unclear if the testing will convince Facebook to roll out this feature to all of its one billion-plus users.
An algorithm is responsible for what shows up in your News Feed. It measures multiple factors to judge what content you might care about the most from your contacts, pages you’ve liked, groups you are a part of, etc.
The most recent change made to News Feed ensures that users don’t often see what people in their network are liking and commenting on. This is a change that it made based on feedback from users who didn’t like to see their News Feed cluttered by updates of other people commenting and liking on different posts.
Facebook is conducting this test with select users on mobile who receive a prompt to “See more of what you love,” it lists friends and pages that the user has liked. The user can then select the pages and users they want so that updates from them always appear in the News Feed regardless of what the algorithm thinks.
Given that the test seems to be in its initial stages right now it wouldn’t be right to assume that Facebook would soon roll out this feature to everyone. For all we know the test results might not be what Facebook expects and it could go against the entire idea.