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Oct 22, 2013

Facebook Reverses Stance — Again — On Violent Viral Video

Sometimes figuring out the fine line between free expression and overly objectionable content is harder than you’d think.

Just ask Facebook, which on Tuesday reversed a stance it took just 24 hours previously and removed from its network a violent video that had been circulating wildly. On Monday, the company had originally defended the video’s posting, considering it a type of free expression from users who were condemning the violent acts.

The move comes after a series of back-and-forth decisions on whether or not the act of posting the video — which depicts the brutal decapitation of a woman — should be considered support for, or an expression against, acts of violence. The video originally made headlines back in May upon first showing up on Facebook, and was immediately taken down following a series of complaints that viewers could suffer long-term psychological damage after watching the gruesome imagery.

The entire debacle speaks to a tension Facebook is currently in the midst of navigating. Like Twitter, Facebook wants to let users document events around the world, good or bad. The company wants to be seen as a place for free expression — a conduit for the masses to speak out against perceived injustices.

In leaving up the video, Facebook was making a statement, almost as if saying, “Yes, this is a terrible thing. But we support the right to display injustices on our network in order to fight against them.”

This particular video, it seems, wasn’t the right one on which to hang the company’s free expression flag. The extreme nature of the violence stirred up serious dissent among child protection and online safety groups, causing Facebook to double back on its original stance.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has had difficulty in navigating what is allowed on Facebook. The company took heat over the past few years for banning some instances of women breastfeeding on its network, while allowing others. Facebook maintains its terms of service are similar to television and print media in this regard.

Tuesday’s takedown may appease some. But it remains to be seen how well Facebook will handle being the arbiter of exactly what constitutes objectionable content too extreme for its network in the future.

Below is the company’s statement in full, along with its position on future potentially objectionable content:

“People turn to Facebook to share their experiences and to raise awareness about issues important to them. Sometimes, those experiences and issues involve graphic content that is of public interest or concern, such as human rights abuses, acts of terrorism, and other violence. When people share this type of graphic content, it is often to condemn it. If it is being shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate violence, Facebook removes it.

As part of our effort to combat the glorification of violence on Facebook, we are strengthening the enforcement of our policies.

First, when we review content that is reported to us, we will take a more holistic look at the context surrounding a violent image or video, and will remove content that celebrates violence.

Second, we will consider whether the person posting the content is sharing it responsibly, such as accompanying the video or image with a warning and sharing it with an age-appropriate audience.

Based on these enhanced standards, we have re-examined recent reports of graphic content and have concluded that this content improperly and irresponsibly glorifies violence. For this reason, we have removed it.

Going forward, we ask that people who share graphic content for the purpose of condemning it do so in a responsible manner, carefully selecting their audience and warning them about the nature of the content so they can make an informed choice about it.”

https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/img/Courtesy_AllThingsD.PNG?w=AADhU-XmFUQBqLAKNzHree-e13TeHVVxDCNGJq8XzHNAWg

By: Unknown On 7:16 PM

Oct 7, 2013

Facebook Study Tracks Matriculation to Matrimony

College bound? You could end up graduating with more than just a degree.

Nearly one-third of all married United States college graduates on Facebook went to the same college as their partners, according to a new study from Facebook’s data science team. And aside from that, about 15 percent of that same demographic ended up marrying someone who went to the same high school.

A few caveats here: Facebook only counted those over 25 when surveying, and if a couple shares both high school and college, then only the high school is counted.

Some of the findings seem to be common sense. There’s at least some correlation, for instance, between how conservative and religious the student body of the school is, and how often graduates of said schools end up marrying one another. Perhaps “commitment” as an ideal plays into that likelihood.

Worth noting, too, that those who went to high school in urban areas aren’t as likely to marry someone who attended the same high school, especially compared to those from rural areas. Again, seemingly a common sense thing: The higher the population density, I’d guess the diminishing likelihood of meeting a mate at a more populous school.

The colleges to hit if you’re looking to settle down afterward? If you’re a woman, schools like the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Michigan Technological University and the U.S. Air Force Academy are your best bets; about 60 percent or more of women who graduated from these schools also had spouses who studied there as well. For men, the top schools included those such as Harding University, Martin Luther College and Brigham Young University (most, again, are religiously affiliated).

Now if only Facebook could tell us how many of those couples make it for the long haul.

By: Unknown On 2:50 PM

Oct 3, 2013

The houses that Facebook built are coming to Menlo Park

Company housing has bad historical precedents and worse contemporary examples.

by Casey Johnston

Facebook revealed plans Wednesday to build a $120 million, 394-unit housing community near its Menlo Park, California, offices. The development, named Anton Menlo, will in part address the housing shortage in the area—employees often inquire about where they should live, according to The Wall Street Journal—but it will also operate as a semi-self-contained community with a number of amenities, among them a very short commute time to work.

All but 15 of the apartments will be open to non-Facebook employees, and Facebook is retiring about the community’s prospects as a perk for employees. But the company worked with a San Francisco developer to ape the style of Facebook’s own headquarters in Menlo Park so that, in theory, employees would have a seamless transition between the “home” of work and the “home” of home.

Aside from apartments, the area will include a convenience store, sports pub, bike repair shop, yoga studio, pool, cafe, and doggy daycare services. Construction is expected to take at least two years.

As the WSJ points out, the community echoes the concept of company towns that had a brief surge of popularity around the start of the twentieth century. Business moguls like George Pullman and Andrew Carnegie constructed fully realized towns for their working-class employees to live in, collecting them all in the same place and keeping them convenient to their work sites.

Company towns tended to be isolated from other social communities, and workers outside of them would be isolated from each other. Inside the towns there were social events, schools, and even hospitals.

But with the convenience came added social pressure: the company towns were a breeding ground for middle-class values—house ownership and families in a close-knit community—that compelled the employees to stay put. Facebook employees are unlikely to be as prone to feeling a need to move up in the world the way steel workers living in Carnegie’s company town might have. The Facebook employee’s burden is more likely to be a home life built to mirror a work life, among colleagues, that extends a long work day even further. And Anton Menlo seems better suited to housing young engineers than families, with only a handful of three-bedroom apartments. Over half of the residences are one-bedrooms.

A rendering of Anton Menlo, the apartments Facebook plans to build in Menlo Park.

Facebook

Corporate housing is not an unfamiliar concept for large companies, especially tech companies. Employers like Microsoft and Amazon often provide housing options for their interns and temporary placements for employees who are in town or migrating to the area. But Facebook’s move to provide its employees with a permanent, community-focused housing solution is unusual.

Still, big tech companies often become part of the landscape without the company having to build itself apartments. And Facebook's future apartments won't even accommodate that many of the Menlo Park employees, only 10 percent or so. But company housing is a concept that is not really "done” anymore; the closest modern analogy might be the Foxconn and Pegatron dorms, infamous for housing the factory workers who make Apple products in less-than-desirable conditions, or the Olympic Village that puts up athletes while the games are on.

And Facebook's apartments might encourage more of the mixing Steve Jobs targeted when he proposed only two bathrooms for Pixar’s campus. If employees hanging out in luxury common areas with beer and frozen yogurt on the Facebook campus proper are generating good ideas, perhaps half-asleep employees crossing paths while taking the trash out in their pajamas will generate even better ones.

Courtesy: arstechnica

By: Unknown On 9:05 PM

Oct 2, 2013

‘The Circle’ Author Dave Eggers Denies Reading Facebook Memoir That He’s Accused Of Plagiarizing

One of the weirder things to come out of all the discussion around Dave Eggers’ upcoming novel The Circle (which focuses on life at a fictional tech company) has been the accusation by Kate Losse that parts of Eggers’ book are lifted from The Boy Kings, her memoir of her experience as an early Facebook employee.

McSweeney’s, the San Francisco-based publishing that Eggers founded, just sent me a statement from Eggers denying that he read Losse’s book at all. To be honest, I’ve found Losse’s claims to be pretty unpersuasive (more on that in a second), but the statement also includes some interesting commentary about the research that Eggers did (or didn’t) do for the novel, so I figured it was worth noting. Here it is:

I’ve just heard about the claims of Kate Losse that my novel, The Circle, was somehow based on a work of nonfiction she wrote. I want to make it clear that I have never read and have never heard of her book before today. I did not, in fact, read any books about any internet companies, or about the experiences of anyone working at any of these companies, either before or while writing The Circle. I avoided all such books, and did not even visit any tech campuses, expressly because I didn’t wantThe Circle to seem to be based on any extant companies or upon the experiences of any employees of any extant companies. Because The Circle has not been released, it’s my understanding that Kate Losse has not read my novel yet, so I trust that when she does read it she’ll understand that I have not read, and certainly never lifted anything from, her book.

This denial probably won’t persuade people who seem to agree that there are suspicious parallels between Losse’s book and Eggers’, so maybe we should take a closer look at Losse’s claim. As noted in the statement, Losse says she hasn’t read the book (the official publication date is Oct 8), so she’s basing her accusation on an excerpt published in The New York Times Magazine, and she posted annotated excerpts from The Boy Kings highlighting similarities.

Losse first notes that like her, Eggers’ protagonist is hired to work in Customer Experience at a tech company, which isn’t exactly a telling or hugely specific detail — when I left Stanford in 2006, applying for customer experience jobs was one of the default paths for people who didn’t know what they were going to do with their lives. (True story: I applied for multiple customer experience jobs at Google, and was rejected for all them.)

That first note also says, “Her name eerily echoes mine in its phonetic structure: Katherine Penney Losse/Maebelline Renner Holland & in short form as well: ‘Kate Losse/Mae Holland.’” Hmmm.

Losse’s next annotation notes that both books include scenes where someone tells the new customer experience employee what their job will be like. The one after that says there are discussions of company passwords.

It all seems to me, at least, to consist entirely of generic parallels covering experiences that will be familiar to many TechCrunch readers. I’m not trying to dismiss some of the broader issues of cultural appropriation that Losse brings up, but I’m not sure an unconvincing claim that someone is “ripping off” your book is the best arena for that discussion.

The other interesting thing about Eggers’ statements is how he goes out of his way to deny doing any research related to specific tech companies, whether it’s reading books or visiting offices. That might dampen the enthusiasm of some writers who see the book’s sinister tech company (which, like the novel itself, is called The Circle) as way to take “vengeance” on Google and Facebook. Eggers seems to be arguing that he isn’t attacking any particular company, and that the book is meant to be a broader critique of tech trends and culture.

Of course, if you wrote a novel implying that Facebook and Google are evil, it may just be easier to disavow any specific attack and let others make the comparisons.

Courtesy: techcrunch

By: Unknown On 9:37 AM

Oct 1, 2013

Facebook Says Its Mobile App Ads Work, So It’s Making More of Them

One big reason that investors like Facebook again: The company looks like it has figured out how to make money — a lot of money — on mobile.

One big reason Facebook looks like it has figured out mobile: App-install ads, which developers use to encourage Facebook users to download their software onto their phones.

Now Facebook is going back to the well, and will try to make even more money from app developers.

Screenshot - HotelTonight mobile app ad for engagement and conversion

This time it is selling them ads that link directly from Facebook’s app to apps users have already installed, in hopes of driving usage and/or sales.

The idea: A music app like Spotify could use the new ads to direct listeners to new songs that have appeared on the service. Or a retailer could tell a potential shopper about a sale, and send them directly to their app.

Facebook Hires New U.S. Sales Boss

Facebook has a new executive running its U.S. sales team: David Lawenda, who ran sales at Univision for five years until he left last summer, will report to sales boss Carolyn Everson. Lawenda fills a vacancy left by Tom Arrix, who left Facebook in July after a seven-year run.

Sep 30, 2013

In Race With Twitter, Facebook, Like, Fluffs Its Social TV Numbers

On the same day that Twitter and Nielsen are debuting their first TV Ratings report emerging from the two companies’ partnership, Facebook is slyly releasing official numbers designed to give its own TV efforts a boost.

Facebook claims that AMC’s hot “Breaking Bad” finale was a hit across its social network, generating more than 5.5 million interactions from 3 million+ users. Twitter, meanwhile, saw 1.47 million tweets in comparison from 682,000+ uniques for the same show. What does this mean for Twitter, whose forthcoming IPO is heavily dependent on its TV partnerships and ad business? Is Facebook moving in for the kill?

Well, maybe. But Facebook’s numbers feel a little fudged here.

For background, Facebook announced that it will begin sending out weekly TV reports to the U.S.’s top four networks this week – a move that was not coincidentally disclosed just ahead of the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating report’s launch. Facebook says it will send data to ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS as well as a few other select partners, in order to demonstrate to what extent social conversations around TV programs are now taking place on its own network.

For example, Facebook found that ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” generated over a million interactions across 750,000 users on its network. Previously, reports had stated that Facebook seesfive times as much TV-related activity on its network than on Twitter. But as TechCrunch’s Josh Constine said before, that’s not a fair comparison.

A LIKE IS NOT EQUAL TO A TWEET

To state the obvious, Facebook is much bigger than Twitter: 1.15 billion monthly actives versusTwitter’s 200+ million. One could argue its numbers for almost anything will be bigger. But really, it’s Facebook’s looser definition of active engagement that makes comparing its figures to Twitter’s a problem. Facebook, you see, counts nearly any engagement with its content among its “interactions” – it includes not only those posting status updates themselves, but also others who then like, comment or re-share that post to their own networks of friends.

Facebook counting a “like” as an “interaction” is like Twitter counting a “favorite.” It’s not an ideal metric to lump in with Facebook posts or re-shares, but, rather, should be treated as a separate category of interaction.

After all, there are a number of reasons why you may like someone’s Facebook status, and it’s not always directly related to the TV content they’ve shared. You might like a post because your friend also cracked a funny joke of some sort along with their note about the show they’re watching, but that doesn’t mean you’re also a viewer or a fan. Or the post might contain more information beyond the TV show identified through basic keyword matching, and it’s the other part of the post that you’re actually “liking.”

Many social networks like to fluff their numbers when it serves a purpose. Google reports steady increases in Google+ growth, for example, making it sound like Google+ (the destination website) is a bigger player in social than it really is. In reality, Google+ numbers are growing because Google+ is being baked in as the social layer across Google products ranging from Gmail to, most recently,YouTube comments.

FACEBOOK’S SOCIAL TV DATA COULD BECOME BETTER IN TIME

At launch, Facebook’s TV reports are not on par with Twitter’s. It will not include other data like how many people saw activity where a TV show is being discussed – something Twitter and Nielsen’s TV Rating report is already doing. And tracking this metric will be more difficult on Facebook, because its filtered News Feed doesn’t show users every post from friends.

There are also hints that Facebook has had to work quickly to overcome potentially bad data here, indicating that its move to court TV networks is more reactive than proactive in this situation. In The WSJ’s relaying of Facebook’s news, it noted that before fine-tuning its system, which relies on keywords, Facebook had problems where it reported CBS’s “NCIS” too highly because “NCIS” is a string of letters found in the more often mentioned term “San Francisco.” (To address this issue, Facebook had to create a database of characters and other keywords related to each show in order to not end up with false positives.)

That said, as Facebook ramps up its efforts in this space, its data could become more valuable in the long run because there’s more of it, and it includes profile demographics. The company has already unleashed anonymized data to select news outlets and marketers for other purposes, so there’s no reason why it couldn’t do the same for TV networks now.

TWITTER WINNING THE SECOND SCREEN FOR NOW

Meanwhile, as Facebook gets up to speed with social TV data, Twitter is building out a business based on being the preferred “second screen” app. To serve up TV ratings and analysis, Twitter partnered with Nielsen, which owns SocialGuide, for TV ratings. It acquired companies like Bluefin Labs and Trendrr to further beef up its social TV efforts. With Twitter Amplify, it’s allowing broadcasters to embed short video clips in their tweets in near real-time. And it partnered with CBS on Amplify just this month. It’s also privately experimenting with a DVR-like functionality that would allow you to replay TV-related tweets as you watch a show after its original airing.

In addition, Twitter rolled out TV Ad Targeting programs this summer, which let U.S. advertisers target those who just saw their TV commercials while watching a given show. Twitter has a semantic understanding of what people are talking about here, too. Most importantly, being pushed the ad twice seems to work well, according to early reports. Nielsen found that the combination of TV ad and follow-up tweet delivered 95 percent stronger message association and 58 percent higher purchase intent than TV ads alone.

With all these initiatives underway, Twitter, though smaller and less diverse (the site sees a disproportionate number of young female users CBS’s chief researcher officer told The WSJ), is for now ahead of Facebook in terms of making a business out of the social TV data it has on hand.

Courtesy: techcrunch

By: Unknown On 7:10 PM

All public Facebook posts ever made are now searchable

It's still subject to privacy controls, but Graph Search's new reach is deep.

by Casey Johnston

Facebook Graph Search now includes posts and status updates in its results, according to a Facebook blog post Monday. Such searches will accept modifiers like time—“All of my posts from 2012” for instance—location, or people who participated.

This new aspect of Graph Search will take advantage of Facebook’s recently announced hashtags. One intended purpose is for users to search posts among different social groups for topic matter, e.g., “posts about Breaking Bad by my friends.” Graph Search will also allow searches based on tagged locations (“Posts from the Empire State Building”) or involvement of other users (“Posts my friend John Smith has commented on”).

The search is still subject to privacy controls, so users won’t be able to see results they couldn’t view otherwise. But this opens up all public posts ever, as well as any posted shared directly to each user, to aggregation, and it’s worth noting that Facebook updates are set to be public by default. Ostensibly, Facebook hopes that this will create a Twitter-like feed of activity that users can view and interact with.

Like the OG Graph Search before it, new Graph Search seems prone to surfacing connections and trends we may not ever want to acknowledge. Facebook states that the feature will roll out slowly to a small number of users who already have Graph Search. If there’s anything out and about in your timeline that you might not want to be search-ready, time to toggle some privacy settings.

Courtesy: arstechnica

By: Unknown On 3:49 PM

Flurry Names Former Facebook VP Grady Burnett as COO

Flurry, a mobile app analytics and advertising platform, announced Monday that it has named Grady Burnett as its chief operating officer.

Before his new position, Burnett spent more than four years at Facebook as vice president of global sales and operations, working to grow the social giant’s international sales team under COO Sheryl Sandberg. Prior to that, Burnett worked with Sandberg during his five years at Google, where he worked on the DoubleClick platform and in various sales and management positions.

Part of the reason for his new position, Burnett said, is to focus on Flurry’s real-time-bidding advertising platform, an area of the company Flurry is less known for, but is attempting to grow.

“In Flurry, I really saw a company that is at the intersection of global programmatic ad buying and data,” Burnett said in an interview. It’s a space rife with activity at the moment, especially considering Twitter’s multimillion-dollar purchase of mobile RTB exchange MoPub.

Along with leading Flurry’s RTB efforts, Burnett will work on leading the company’s sales and marketing divisions, as well as business development, ad and business operations, and customer service.

Burnett begins his first day at Flurry on Monday.

Courtesy: allthingsd

By: Unknown On 8:21 AM

Sep 29, 2013

Should Facebook Start Its Own Version Of Google Ventures?

by LEENA RAO & Josh Constine

Over the past year, Facebook has seen its fair share of departures from employees and executives who are either starting a VC fund or camping out at a firm to figure out what their next startup or company will be. In the past two weeks, product manager Justin Shaffer left, and rumor has it he is starting a VC fund. Facebook engineering and product lead Greg Badros announced his departure, and it sounds like he’ll be focusing on investing. Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya has been collecting technical talent from Facebook into his EIR program. And there are many more examples of Facebookers going to VC firms or starting to invest of late. Our question is, why doesn’t Facebook just form its own venture group so some of these employees could stay connected to the company?

There are many more reasons beyond just retaining talent for Facebook to form a corporate VC firm. Facebook has a substantial opportunity to do what Google Ventures has done in the VC world. Considering the interest its staffers now have in venture capital and advising startups, Facebook could build a new brand of venture capital. The social network has an enormous amount of talent that has been through the trenches of growth, parsing through large amounts of data, advertising, product development and more. As VCs become more hands-on, Facebook could tap its wealth of knowledge and experience to help portfolio startups. Similar to Google Ventures, Facebook could draw on its enormous base of employees to help grow startups. Facebook has already become an ecosystem with many former employees starting companies, so a company could easily grab great deal flow from its alums alone.

Facebook had already been participating as a partner in larger funds operated by other VC firms. The social network invested in Kleiner Perkins’s Fund in 2010, which was a $250 million fund dedicated to backing social startups. Facebook also helped administer the FbFund, a $10 million seed fund that was jointly funded by Founders Fund and Accel Partners to back startups developing websites and applications related to the Facebook Platform. Facebook discontinued the fund in 2010.

The opportunity for investing is so much broader than startups built on the Facebook platform.

From 2006 to the first half of 2012, Facebook alums had raised $271 million of venture capital funding since 2006. As of the first half of 2012, the Facebook mafia had pulled in $130 million in VC funding in 2012 alone. We’re sure that number increased significantly over the past year.

Facebook alums and current employees who landed windfalls in the IPO are already actively seed investing. If you take a look at AngelList, there are hundreds of current and former Facebookers who are angels. In Google Ventures’ case, Google is the firm’s sole LP. While Facebook hasn’t stockpiled the amount of cash that Google has, Facebook could do something slightly different with its employees who want to invest, such as make certain employees LPs of a fund alongside the company itself.

When it comes to talent, a corporate VC arm makes sense for Facebook when you consider a number of factors. First, talent that wants to potentially go into venture as an investor can stay within the Facebook umbrella. Clearly we see this happening as experienced operators and product managers at the network are starting to move over to traditional VC firms or start their own firms.

From what we’ve heard, a lot of Facebook’s top employees have been working there since college or right after graduating. Some feel they’ve “done their duty” to make the world more open and connected. It’s not that they dislike Facebook, but they want to try something new. If Facebook created a VC firm, it could be an outlet for taking on fresh challenges without leaving the company entirely.

“FBVC” could create a home for more than just potential investors. For example, Google Ventures employs a number of designers in-house to help its portfolio startups. Many of these designers came from Google. Facebook has had trouble retaining design talent lately, with departures of Instagram’s Tim Van Damme, Messenger’s Chris Kalani, and Facebook Stickers lead Sophie Xie all leaving in the last two months. Xie just completed a month of contract design work for ex-Facebooker Carl Sjogreen’s new startup Shadow Puppet. Perhaps a role as Facebook Ventures’ in-house designer could have let her dabble with different companies while remaining part of the Facebook family.

A Facebook venture group would also provide an alternative place for the company’s employees to park themselves for a year in an EIR role to figure out what they want to do next. Palihapitiya believes that talent needs this time to really determine what the next role could be. And this would give EIRs the opportunity to team up with other Facebookers to start companies. In the past year, Palihapitiya has been able to bring over a number of key product managers to his firm to simply network and figure out what they can do next. Best case scenario, these Facebookers will team up on a new idea or startup, and Facebook could grab some meaningful equity. Another talent benefit for a Facebook Ventures arm would be to create a second home for great talent that Facebook wants to pick up, but doesn’t want to work on executing product or business.

It’s worth noting that not every successful technology company has a VC arm. Yes, there’s Amazon, Google Ventures, Intel Capital, and Microsoft Ventures; but Apple doesn’t have a VC arm (Apple does apparently, have a fund that makes private equity deals). Apple’s general investment strategy has been to acquire talent and companies that fit its technology and product strategies, and the company has notoriously been a closed environment. Once you leave the company, you are closed off. Google is on the other end of the spectrum as it has created an ecosystem with its various offshoots, such as Google Ventures.

One complication Facebook would have to deal with if it entered venture is avoiding the perception that its platform favors companies it invests in. That could sour relations with the ecosystem it’s built around its login, sharing, backend hosting, and advertising services. Startups might be less enthusiastic to build on Facebook if they feel they’re handicapped unless they have Facebook on their cap table.

But as Facebook grows into a bona-fide Internet giant, it needs to do everything it can to avoid the type of stagnation that leads to disruption. For many companies its size, that means acquiring and acqui-hiring to bring in the best talent. And there are few better ways to get a close look at startups to potentially buy than by dangling cash to invest.

Facebook will ultimately have to decide whether it wants to go down the Apple route or the Google path. Perhaps it’s too soon, but the company is about to turn 10 years old.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

By: Unknown On 9:40 AM

Facebook admits it needs to improve News Feed ads

Facebook has admitted it needs to bring more relevant ads to users News Feed's to make sure people are seeing adverts they actually care about

In an official blog post, Facebook has admitted it wants to "deliver the right content to the right people at the right time".

Users come across adverts on their individual News Feed, and Facebook wants to make sure that each user is seeing ads that are relevant to them.

Hong Ge, Engineering Manager of News Feed Ads, states, "We are currently working on some updates to the ads algorithm to improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see."

Users will be given relevant ads based on the ads they interact with by clicking, commenting, liking, or sharing.

They will also base the new algorithm on a user's interests and the Pages they like.

The blog post states that "some marketers may see some variation in the distribution of their ads in the coming week."

Facebook revamped its News Feed earlier this year, seeing the biggest design change since Timeline was introduced.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has also previously suggested Facebook should offer a premium service offering users the chance to pay $10 a month to receive no adverts at all on their News Feed.

Source: Facebook Newsroom
Courtesy: T3

By: Unknown On 5:12 AM

Sep 28, 2013

Facebook Tweaks News Feed Algorithm to Show More Relevant Ads

Facebook on Friday announced a slight change to its News Feed algorithm that aims to give greater weight to user feedback on undesirable ads. From now on, Facebook will try to show more relevant advertisements to users inside the News Feed, which may mean fewer ads delivered. Facebook’s goal for marketers, the company said, is to deliver the right ads to the people who want to see them the most, even if it means fewer ads delivered overall.

Courtesy: allthingsd

By: Unknown On 12:27 PM