News broke last week that Facebook’s experimentation with category-based versions of its news feed is expanding to mobile devices. The idea seems to be that the general Newsfeed is filtering too much and people are missing things they’re interested in so categories of content need to be broken out for people to explore and do some limited editing on to fine tune.
If this sounds like RSS…you’re not wrong. With the exception that RSS is totally outside the control of a company with its own agenda and is subject only to the end user’s whims and preferences.
That diatribe aside, this kind of move is indicative of our current media climate where we’re encouraged at every turn to follow, connect with and like every company that crosses our path. With so many connections being made it becomes more and more important for the platforms on which those connections are happening to give people the tools to filter the updates they’re getting. Networks like Facebook are only useful to people if the information they convey continues to be useful. So they need to keep tweaking the Newsfeed and now putting in other filters to keep the value high. Twitter Lists do this too but that feature is so buried for casual users as to be almost non-existent.
Again, I can go on a pretty healthy diatribe here about how the control Facebook in particular exercise is dangerous to the quality of the public discourse and a bad bait-and-switch after years of telling companies to build up their networks. But for content marketers this is another reminder that the best thing you can do is to try and optimize your content as best you can based on what is and isn’t working with your audience.
If you’re not a fan, I can show you how to get hooked into RSS. It’s much better.
Viva la RSS!