Facebook’s News Feed is now 10 years old. Facebook founder, Mark Zukerberg (CEO) celebrated it with a long post on his Facebook page .
News Feed wasn’t there in the initial version of Facebook when it was just meant for a bunch of college students. Then, Facebook was called ‘thefacebook’ and would show only details about your Friends and not the activity they do on the social network platform.
“This invention is one of my favorite stories from Facebook’s history. Sometimes people talk about the “idea” behind Facebook, as if it was a single concept that came out fully formed. But Facebook, like everything, is made of many ideas and inventions,” Zukerberg said in the post.
He further added, “At the beginning of Facebook, there was no News Feed. For more than two years, Facebook was just a collection of profiles. You could visit a friend’s page to look up some basic details about them, but there was no way to see updates from all your friends or be sure they saw yours.”
Capturing the entire history, Zukerberg also wrote about the initial disliking from the users towards the News Feed. Mark Wrote: “About 1 million people joined a protest group threatening to quit if we didn’t change Facebook back. I remember there were actual protesters in the streets outside our office demanding we change”.
However, the decision paid off eventually as the News Feed became one of the most important features of the social network. Currently, News Feed does a lot more than it used to do. Today, you have an option of choosing what you want to see in your News Feed, you also get an option to choose certain people whose posts would appear on top. Moreover, users are also able to Follow and Unfollow certain people and pages. And not to forget News Feed’s importance for news sharing and other time-centric information which people often get to know through Facebook.
The post went on to read: “But one of the things I’m most proud of about Facebook is that we believe things can always be better, and we’re willing to make big bets if we think it will help our community over the long term. News Feed has been one of the big bets we’ve made in the past 10 years that has shaped our community and the whole internet the most.”