Facebook News Feed, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 35Ben Gilbert 14Mark Zuckerberg 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Facebook News Feed comes up
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:39:36 David Rosenthal Photos, newsfeed, platform, which is really what this I'm bored feature is.
- ▶ 1:40:21 David Rosenthal Well, that becomes a true, true innovation in Newsfeed, but I think at the time, there was a lot of buzz and talk about personalized portals, and like Yahoo was really big on this, and Google was even kind of big on this, like, oh, make…
- ▶ 1:41:41 David Rosenthal All of those tags get published out as activity to newsfeed.
- ▶ 1:42:07 David Rosenthal All of that becomes activity that then gets published to newsfeed.
- ▶ 1:42:11 David Rosenthal That generates more desire from more people who see that on Facebook in the newsfeed.
- ▶ 1:42:29 David Rosenthal All of that now gets published back to Newsfeed.
- ▶ 1:44:08 Ben Gilbert Component to what it meant to be a social network, and as you were saying with Newsfeed, that wouldn't happen for another, what was that, late summer of 2006 or something?
- ▶ 1:44:50 David Rosenthal Until newsfeed.
- ▶ 1:58:30 David Rosenthal Mark knew, though, and he had planted the seeds that both newsfeed and open registration were gonna be coming later that year, and he was definitely making that calculus here, too, of like, well, I don't know what the probability…
- ▶ 2:08:33 David Rosenthal So the three of them start working on Newsfeed, and so we've talked about things like photos and the fundamental architecture of the site.
- ▶ 2:08:42 David Rosenthal Newsfeed required, like, a whole new level of engineering prowess to get this thing to work.
- ▶ 2:08:54 David Rosenthal But Newsfeed was, like, pushing the state of the art of what was possible in technology and on the internet.
- ▶ 2:09:40 Ben Gilbert So there was an engineer who did something really kind of hacky because they didn't want to at first put all the engineering resources into building out something like Newsfeed, which is
- ▶ 2:10:17 Ben Gilbert Why is it so difficult to build something like a news feed?
- ▶ 2:12:45 Ben Gilbert They needed to happen on separate boxes to run this process, cache the results, and then when you loaded your newsfeed, go fetch them.
- ▶ 2:12:53 Ben Gilbert So this is like a whole new application using the same data that the company has to build in order to make newsfeed happen.
- ▶ 2:15:22 David Rosenthal Through News Feed.
- ▶ 2:15:49 Ben Gilbert People cannot get enough of scrolling through the new newsfeed.
- ▶ 2:16:44 David Rosenthal There's this revolt in the streets against Newsfeed, which, to Mark's mind, along with OpenReg, which was supposed to come, like, two days later of opening up Facebook to anybody,
- ▶ 2:16:58 David Rosenthal They delayed that because of the newsfeed reaction.
- ▶ 2:17:08 David Rosenthal The board, the management team, everybody's like, all right, we got to roll newsfeed back.
- ▶ 2:17:19 David Rosenthal And to add a kicker, newsfeed actually
- ▶ 2:18:18 David Rosenthal of your activities get published to News Feed and what don't.
- ▶ 2:19:18 Ben Gilbert We've been getting a lot of feedback about News Feed.
- ▶ 2:20:58 David Rosenthal It just happened to be that that was true with News Feed, but that wouldn't always be true.
- ▶ 2:21:03 David Rosenthal So originally, the two big initiatives, News Feed and Open Registration, were supposed to basically launch together, and they chose to do News Feed first because it was going to be, A, a little bit easier to roll out, and B, more valuable…
- ▶ 2:22:12 David Rosenthal In a weird sort of perverse way, I think because of all the controversy around Newsfeed, when OpenReg launched, there wasn't the same kind of controversy.
- ▶ 2:22:23 David Rosenthal People were already desensitized, or they had just been through Newsfeed, and they're like, alright, yeah, whatever.
- ▶ 2:22:50 David Rosenthal And now with News Feed, there is this mechanism that makes sure, like, hey, even as randos, from your perspective, join Facebook, you're still seeing the updates of people you
- ▶ 2:33:40 David Rosenthal I think developers were getting plenty of value just out of the distribution, and that was coming from newsfeed.
- ▶ 2:33:47 David Rosenthal If a user starts using your Facebook app, and then the activity that they're doing on your app is getting published to the newsfeeds of all their friends.
- ▶ 2:34:31 David Rosenthal So, for a year or two that is the state of play, Facebook, brilliantly for them, eventually pulls back on organic newsfeed distribution for apps.
- ▶ 2:34:47 Ben Gilbert You don't need to know every time there's a new mafia war move by so-and-so showing up in your newsfeed.
- ▶ 2:51:25 David Rosenthal But he's like, well, we have this incredible social activity happening on Facebook, and we know through newsfeed that people engage with and they, and they love it.
- ▶ 2:51:59 David Rosenthal And what this ends up being in practice is brands publishing your friend's e-commerce activity into your newsfeed.
- ▶ 2:52:21 David Rosenthal As any, because like the core thing that you do on Facebook is you engage with your friends and you engage with their stories on newsfeed.
- ▶ 2:53:35 Ben Gilbert Into the newsfeed purchases that people were making.
- ▶ 2:55:24 David Rosenthal And Mark and the company is coming off the news feed experience where they're like,
- ▶ 2:55:32 David Rosenthal So, they let it run for a couple weeks, they run the news feed playbook of like, yeah, yeah,
- ▶ 3:06:36 Ben Gilbert The news feed distracted me.
- ▶ 3:08:06 Ben Gilbert 10 friends in 14 days, it's like super different than nine friends in 14 days, but you just set a threshold somewhere, and you set the threshold, and then you're like, okay, if we can deliver this delightful experience where now people…
- ▶ 3:08:25 David Rosenthal The other thing is, it marries perfectly with all of the investment that is going into the algorithmization of Newsfeed, because choosing who to show you in that carousel of people you may know is, like, all the difference in the world,…
- ▶ 3:49:23 David Rosenthal So he teams up with Will Cathcart from the Newsfeed team, from Chris Cox's team, and they go get to work.
- ▶ 3:56:36 David Rosenthal It's the only way that you're gonna have that insight that, like, oh, this is the same problem we had when we launched News Feed.
- ▶ 3:56:44 David Rosenthal The way to fix News Feed and to make it really, really awesome is more News Feed, you know, is more data, right?
- ▶ 6:01:20 unnamed speaker Newsfeed is completely one of them.
- ▶ 6:01:49 unnamed speaker And News Feed.
- ▶ 6:05:32 Ben Gilbert A first-class post in Newsfeed for a while was a check-in on Facebook Places.
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
- ▶ 26:21 Ben Gilbert And this was when Newsfeed was really young, right?
- ▶ 26:24 Ben Gilbert You'd be scrolling through your news feed, and it would be giving you these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify.
- ▶ 1:38:53 Mark Zuckerberg I mean, like, in 2006, when we built the first version of newsfeed, right, the, like, before that, social networks were basically profiles, and then we were like, hey, like, people actually kind of want to get the updates, and let's, like,…
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang · Acquired
- ▶ 25:12 David Rosenthal And these models powered features like the Facebook newsfeed, Google ads, and the YouTube next video recommendation in the process, transforming Google and Facebook into the juggernauts that we know today.