Facebook returns to its roots: showing posts from friends and family

Last year, Mark ZuckerbergThe CEO of Meta, and Tom Alison, one of his best lieutenants, were discussing how they wanted to remodel Facebook for the future of social networks.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who had cultivated Facebook from a sleep room project to a 1.5 trillion dollar company that he had renamed destination, wanted to report a little of the original logic for the social network or what he called vibrations “Ori Facebook”, said Alison in an interview. After years of addition of functionality, the managers believed that some of the key functions of Facebook were drowned.

So they wondered: why not try to build some features that resembled Facebook than a little more?

Thursday, Meta did this with a simple change. The company has said that the Facebook app would now include a separate news feed for users who had posts shared exclusively by friends and people’s family.

The function, called the Friends tab, will replace a card in the app showing new requests for friendship or suggested friends. The Friends card will instead show a sliding feed of posts, such as photos, video stories, text, birthday notifications and friendship requests. For now, it will only be available for Facebook users in the United States and Canada.

“This idea of ​​having a central place of what is happening with your friends was like the magic of the first days of social media,” said Alison, head of the Facebook app. “We are ensuring that there is still a place for these things on Facebook. It is something that should not be lost in the modern social media mix.”

The new feed is a clear removal from the way social media have evolved in the last ten years. The rise of apps like Tiktok’s used users to see posts in their feeds as influencers and content creators, who were often people they had never met. Other companies have followed the example. The Meta apps, which also include Instagram, have started to lean more on the recommended content to keep people busy for longer periods.

Now people view apps such as YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok as something more similar to television-a slender experience fueled by a smaller number of creators who produce hours of entertainment for the rest of the internet to be consumed.

Not everyone welcomed the turn. When Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, he aimed to help university students connect with their friends to the campus. As the app became more popular, it became to help each user to keep up to date with the posts of friends and family.

So when Mr. Zuckerberg announced in 2022 Meta would insert the recommended content On Facebook of people who were not connected to the user, many users rebelled. Many initially found the recommended content – which was based on artificial intelligence for surface suggestions – tonant. After some criticisms, Zuckerberg has slightly reduced the amount of such content to people’s Facebook feeds.

However, this did not prevent Meta from embracing the recommended algorithmic content. In recent years, more feeds of people on Facebook and Instagram have been dominated by creators, companies and brands. Recommended content such as coils, video product of Meta, led people to spend more time on the apps, said the company.

Meta has no intention of stopping adding recommended content to user feeds, Alison said in the interview. For now, the company does not expect the Friends card to be more popular than the home feed recommended content.

And other changes are probably coming to Facebook. Meta plans to introduce other features and updates to Facebook in the next year to make social media still “feel social”, said Alison.

“It’s, frankly, fundamental for Facebook,” he said.