Increasing the haystack = increasing information.

Facebook is doing another tweak on the timeline algorithm because they want “to show people the most interesting stories at the top of their feed”. Ok, sounds fair.

But then their announcement says: “Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves.”

In other words: updates invite updates. It doesn’t work for pages, though, as they “noticed that this effect wasn’t true for text status updates from Pages.” Guess people want to be as noisy as their friends. We’re social animals. But pages are not animals, so we won’t be as noisy as them. Hence we’ll receive more animal/friends-updates and less from pages. Even though some of the pages you’ll probably follow/liked because they’re so damn informative, more informative than your ever bullshitting friends :)

Anyhow, recap. So Facebook changed the algorithm to show people the most interesting stories and hence they tweaked the algorithm in such a way that people post more. In other words: we will increase the haystack so more needles can be found.

Read the full announcement “What Happens When You See More Updates from Friends”.

So why is Facebook doing this really?

1. to show less updates from pages is probably because they want the people maintaining the pages to pay for promoting them.
2. we, the users, will spend even more time on Facebook, hence greater opportunities to monetize either in real money or attention.

I must admit: this algorithm based approach to the timeline is so damn smart of Facebook. In contrast to Twitter they really have a lot to tweak, allowing them to tweak it endlessly so that it will serve their interests best. And we, the users, won’t even notice that we’re being traded.