FB delivers news that matters to you.
The most important news is what’s going on with your own circle of imporant people. And Facebook now delivers that News!
“Feed” is out, after more than a year in development. Even before FB was at all colleges, providing prioritized information about your “friends”, has been a key goal.
Currently the news is only ordered by Time, newest posts at the top. Stories/notifications are excluded only by users deleting them from their own “mini-feeds”. Putting it another way, all of your friends are automatically now “subscribed” to a stream of all of your data modifying activity on the site.
This both encourages you to change your information regularly, but in ways that are meaningful, else you are spamming your friends, and reducing their attention to you.
It also encourages you to visit the site regularly to see this news - some of which could be very time critical, like your friends writing a note asking for something, or a change in relationship status. This way Facebook has finally delivered the “notify me when (insert hot chick or dude) has a relationship status change”, just by friending them. Some people lament that this isn’t available via RSS. FB obviously wants to use this to increase activity across it’s entire site, and also the content is more rich (including news “types” and leading images) than just the typical headlines sent to an rss reader.
In the future, I expect ordering options become richer, to bubble news which is really important to you closer to the top. “importance” of news could be algorithmically determined by how close that friend is to you (by social map facts as well as common site activity) and by what type of news items you’ve chosen to click from within the feed panel. I can easily also envision reddit.com or digg.com style features of content ranking… since something rated as important by your friends is likely to be more important to you as well.
