It was back in 2006 -- exactly 10 years from now that a new home page feature called ‘News Feed’ was announced as an addition to Facebook. It was a complete revamp of the user experience on Facebook. Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile. On the contrary, this new layout created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friend’s activities on Facebook. What’s more? It even highlighted information such as upcoming events, birthdays, profiles changes and more!
Today, Facebook’s News Feed is viewed as one of the most important integral part of the Facebook experience. What most of us don’t know is the fact that when the feedback for this initially started rolling in back in 2006, nearly all of it was negative. The result was unexpected as almost one million people joined a protest group threatening to quit Facebook if it didn’t turn off the new feature. Yet inside Facebook, engineers noticed something important as despite the protest groups, users were twice as engaged to the platform due to news feed.
"That passionate outpouring of sentiment, much of it negative, was being fueled by News Feed itself," one of News Feed's engineers, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, who is now vice president of ads and business platform, said in 2011. It seems like the resistance on the part of Facebook did turn out well.
Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to celebrate the completion of ten years of News Feed by describing the invention as one of his favourite stories from Facebook’s history. He went on to describe News Feed as one of the ‘most advanced systems’ they’ve built and added how nothing like it has ever been built before.
