A decade is a long time even in the real world, and on the Internet it is more like a century, especially in the life of a startup. But that’s how long it has been since Facebook launched the real-time news feed that has become the core of the service for more than 1.5 billion people.
It’s hard to even imagine the social network now without this essential feature, as early Facebook staffer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth recalled during a discussion with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and three other members of the original news-feed team on Tuesday (hosted via Facebook’s live-streaming video service, of course).
At that time, the site “was just a page with a big finger pointing at the number of new posts you had,” Boz said. Users had to click on the profiles of each of the people they were friends with, and then try to remember what their last post was, and whether anything had changed.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
“It’s hard to remember back that far, but you had to just browse around and check people’s profiles, to see who wrote on someone’s wall or what they had posted,” Zuckerberg recalled. “There was no guarantee if you put something on your profile that someone was even going to see it. Now we kind of take it for granted… but at the time, there was really nothing like it in the world.”
After about nine months of work by the three members of the original team, which included Chris Cox—now in charge of product development for the news feed—and Ruchi Sanghvi, the new feature was rolled out late at night on September 5th, 2006. And then all hell broke loose.
Boz left on vacation just before the launch, he recalled during the Live broadcast, and so Sanghvi and Cox and engineer Kang-Xing Jin had to watch the initial reaction while gathered around Zuckerberg’s PC. At that time, Facebook [fortune-stock symbol=”FB”] only had about 10 million users, and a huge number of them seemed to think the news feed was the worst thing that had ever happened to the service.
“We all loved it internally, and it seemed pretty clear it would be a good thing, so when we launched it we expected people to be really excited, and we were waiting for the first feedback to come in,” Zuckerberg said during the Live broadcast. “But it was not good news.” Cox says the team woke up to a new group with more than a million members called “I Hate the News Feed, Turn It Off.”
As the headlines from that time reflect, many people hated the news feed because it changed the way the site worked in a fairly radical way. And they also disliked it because it revealed their behavior—likes and shares and comments, etc.—in a more obvious way.
Many users seemed to see this is an invasion of privacy, something that has become a running theme with almost every new feature that Facebook rolls out. Sanghvi recalls that about 10% of the existing user base threatened to delete their accounts or boycott the service.
Zuckerberg was forced to write an apology for the way the transition was handled. “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,” he wrote, in what many said at the time was a classically tone-deaf manner.
The enthusiasm that the Facebook co-founder and the original team had for the idea of the news feed comes across loud and clear in the Live stream. Sanghvi says that the idea came from watching people clicking around from profile to profile, and trying to think of ways to make that easier for users. But it was clear at the time that there was a huge disconnect between that desire and how it was perceived.
That disconnect arguably continues today, in a variety of ways. The news feed is now used by more than 1.5 billion people every day, and as such it has a huge influence on the information that people see about the world, whether it’s baby photos or news about a bombing or a police shooting.
That influence in turn helps control (whether Facebook wants to admit it or not) the fate of large media entities, who now rely on the social network to send users to their content, or to cut advertising deals with them in return for hosting their content, or to pay them to create Live video. And every time Facebook tweaks its algorithm, those media outlets tremble.
The feed also shapes the way that people see the world in some fairly significant ways, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and others have pointed out. What it chooses to include and exclude can have a huge impact.
On the Live broadcast, Cox says the average user will have more than 2,000 items in their feed, but only enough time or inclination to look at about 200 of them. It’s the job of the news-feed algorithm, he said, to decide which of those to show—and the crucial factor is whether it brings the user closer to his or her friends and family on the service, not necessarily the news itself.
Cox, who joined Facebook a year before the news feed was rolled out, recalled talking with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early staffer Adam D’Angelo about how the news feed should be a “newspaper” for the digital world around its users, a metaphor he and Zuckerberg have continued to use.
That newspaper has become the most popular news source in the history of humanity, and it has also powered the transformation of Facebook from a tiny startup into a globe-spanning behemoth with a market value of more than $375 billion. As a product, it is clearly a massive success. But as a social phenomenon, its true implications are only just starting to be felt.
Chris Cox interviewed for a job the year before news feed launched and Dustin and Adam D’Angelo were talking about the idea of a news feed and how it should be like a newspaper with everything you would be interested in, and Mark was also talking about what it might look like — Boz remembers the old Facebook was just a static page with a big finger pointing at the number of new posts you had, and you had to click and go from profile to profile and try to remember what had changed… so Cox and Boz and Ruchi were on the team to build it; better part of a year, up until the most inglorious launch moment in history — hard to remember back that far, Mark says, first 10 million people there was no feed, just browse around and check people’s profiles, who wrote on someone’s wall… no guarantee if you put something on your profile that someone was going to see it… now we kind of take for granted, have the ability to post a new picture and have a new notice go out, but at the time a pretty big change… there was really nothing like it in the world (FriendFeed?)… lot of different social apps, basically all have their own version of news feed; so internally, we all loved it, seemed pretty clear it would be a good thing, launched it and expected people to be really excited… sitting around and waiting for the first feedback to come in, so excited, it was not good news; groups with hundreds of thousands of people who were talking about how they hated it… had to sneak out the back door, Boz went on vacation… Chris and I were sitting in the office, saying Holy Moly… 10% of the user base threatened to leave or boycott Facebook; but looking at the logs, it was actually working, people were twice as engaged, spending more time, sharing a lot more about themselves — number one group was called “I Hate The News Feed, Turn It Off”… but then the second was about Darfur and one about breast cancer, over a million people in all of these groups, really showed the potential for bringing people together, groups of that size just weren’t possible at the time… Mark says favorite group was “Linkin Park Knows How I Feel”… then people protesting in the streets, how many other things have we done where we had people protesting in the streets? Not that many… whole point of news feed is to bring you closer to friends and family that you care about, things like Live, all with that mission in mind, ranking is a part of that, make sure you don’t miss the most important stories of the day… average person will have 2,000 stories they could read but only ability to read about 200, so ranking is designed to solve that problem; Mark says it’s a really hard AI problem… do surveys where we ask whether those are the most important things, judge the quality of the news feed AI based on your responses, which friends you’re going to care about more on any given day… lot more work to do, content is always evolving, used to be just text, now video, which is harder for AI; to this day, news feed is one of most technically advanced systems that exists in the industry, sorting through all these posts to find the most important for a billion people a day is a big challenge… for a long time, the most requested feature was a “dislike” button, thought about how to come up with a UI that allowed more expression, but didn’t add more clutter, studied what was already happening, which were six or seven most used one or two-word comments… that’s what the initial reactions were… same with news feed, noticed people just jumping from profile to profile and just tried to make that easier; still feel it’s the number one product and social service on the internet…