{"id":645660,"date":"2013-03-07T10:48:39","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T15:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=617817"},"modified":"2013-03-07T10:48:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T15:48:39","slug":"facebook-vs-twitter-how-do-you-like-your-social-news-feed-filtered-or-unfiltered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/645660","title":{"rendered":"Facebook vs. Twitter: How do you like your social news feed, filtered or unfiltered?"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Times<\/em> writer Nick Bilton’s complaints this week about how little<\/a> engagement his content gets on Facebook sparked a debate about whether the network is deliberately hiding certain types of content in order to promote its paid-reach services — but it also highlighted how much Facebook controls<\/a> the feed users see, often in ways that they don’t understand or may not even be aware of. <\/p>\n

Facebook is going to be launching some new features for its feed on Thursday, which may include new ways of filtering specific kinds of content<\/a> and possibly new advertising features. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to show you everything, without filtering or ranking it in any way. Which method is better? That depends on how and why you are using it.<\/p>\n

Much of Bilton’s criticism revolves around what some call the “subscribe” function, which allows users to get updates from others without having to ask their permission. When it launched in the fall of 2011, it was widely seen as an attempt to copy Twitter’s “asymmetric following” model<\/a>, since Twitter lets users get updates from whoever they wish — whereas Facebook’s model has always been symmetric, in the sense that users must agree to be friends before they can see each other’s updates. Late last year, Facebook changed the name of this feature to “follow,”<\/a> which made the similarity to Twitter even more obvious. <\/p>\n

Do you want to see everything in your feed?<\/h2>\n

\"twitter<\/a><\/p>\n

As an attempt to copy Twitter<\/a>, the follow feature seems to be largely a failure — at least if the experiences of Bilton and others who have complained about Facebook’s newsfeed, such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban<\/a>, are anything to go by. They say they don’t get much engagement, which makes them question whether their content is even reaching their subscribers, and whether Facebook is tweaking their feed so that certain kinds of updates don’t show up as frequently.<\/p>\n

The last time this topic came up, when Cuban and actor George Takei were criticizing the network because of the lack of engagement from subscribers, a number of Facebook users attacked the company<\/a> for filtering their feeds and not showing them all of the updates from pages or individuals they were following. Some users said the equivalent of: “If I subscribe to someone, I want to see all their updates, not just the ones that you choose to show me.”<\/p>\n