QuoteYou may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there's a good chance you'd be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of "News Feed Optimization", and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.
At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward. But first, some definitions: every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they're creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.
Each Edge has three components important to Facebook's algorithm:
- First, there's an affinity score between the viewing user and the item's creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you'll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven't spoken to in years.
- Second, there's a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
- And finally there's the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.
Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object's EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user's feed. It's worth pointing out that the act of creating an Object is also considered an Edge, which is what allows Objects to show up in your friends' feeds before anyone has interacted with them.
- Jason Kincaid, Apr 22, 2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/
...and imo, 'Comments' are the single most valuable factor in an object's EdgeRank and it would appear as though the hierarchy of Facebook EdgeRank importance is as follows:
- Photo/Video
- Links
- Status updates
Interesting, thanks.
I find this annoying, though - I want to see everyone's posts.
Unfortunately, there are always people who chat loads, end up dominating the feed, and therefore get more attention.
So Edgerank simply ends up self-reinforcing it's own presumptions if not careful.
I think right now you're circles of connections are whats dominating what you see. In my case, I am friends with about 60 jiu-jitsu guys... I see nothing except jiu-jitsu stuff.
But honestly, I think I'm being simplistic. I think if you REALLY personalized your account, you could tweak your results, but most people (myself included) have no idea how to find all their hidden preference pages to do that. Maybe if I tagged some people as family, etc, thing might change, but I wonder... my favorite's button doesn't seem like its connected to anything:)
I had missed this knowledge earlier, so thanks for bringing it up.