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How Facebook Became Your Lens on the World

More than any other single person, Chris Cox is responsible for your lens on the world.

If Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook’s brain and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg its heart, then Cox—chief product officer—is its soul, as empathetic to 2G cell phone users in developing countries (Cox’s wife, filmmaker Visra Vichit-Vadakan, is the granddaughter of a Thai politician, historian and novelist) as he is to his early-adopter friends in San Francisco and his English teacher mom back in Winnetka, Illinois.

He is so critical to Facebook’s people and products that more than a decade into his time with the company, he still leads the most important part of Facebook’s weekly on-boarding of new employees: the story of Facebook’s mission to make the world more open and connected. He has given this talk to employees and customers literally hundreds of times. I’ve heard him give it at least a dozen. It’s as engaging and relevant today as it has ever been because he cannot contain his enthusiasm for what technology can make possible for people. For how the work of Facebook and others is a natural expansion of the pace and scale of media that goes back to the Gutenberg press and language itself and the future of which was imagined by Cox’s favorite visionary, Marshall McLuhan, who famously foresaw a version of the Internet and World Wide Web 30 years before it came to be.

Listening to Cox’s narrative, it dawns on the room that what is possible today with smartphones and technologies like Facebook and others was considered science fiction a mere 20 years ago. His interest in connecting people runs so deep that by the end of the session, Facebook’s mission—which in the wrong hands could come across as corny and overreaching—feels like precisely the thing you would want to be a part of.

Cox himself connected to that mission back in 2005. At the urging of then roommate and early Facebook employee Ezra Callahan, Cox—at the time a graduate student working on artificial intelligence and natural language processing at nearby Stanford University—arrived unceremoniously on his bike at the very unceremonious Palo Alto offices of Facebook. This upstart would most likely not be right for him. A few conversations later, however, having listened to some of Zuckerberg’s cofounders describe the opportunity to connect people far beyond the college website that was publicly evident at the time, Cox wound up calling his mom to tell her he’d be joining Facebook as a software engineer. A year later, he and the team would build and launch Facebook’s most important feature: News Feed.

His impact on Facebook was perhaps best captured by Lori Goler—Facebook’s People vice president since Cox’s return to the product side of the business in 2008—on the 10th anniversary of his start at Facebook: “Facebook is what it is—inside and out—because of you.”

News Feed, or the Unexpected Virtue of a Deeply Unpopular Launch

As popular as Cox is, his first big product launch very much was not. Heading into 2006, Facebook was big with its college audience and had six million users, but the product team was observing—the staggering amounts of data Facebook’s users generate hold many crucial lessons—that people were liberally clicking through other people’s profiles but lacked a central, easy way of answering their biggest question: “What’s going on?”

It was a missed opportunity to essentially become the search engine of your life.

In that realization—that connections matter only to the extent that interesting information flows easily between them—was borne the idea for News Feed, a continually updated, roughly reverse chronological listing in the middle of your Facebook page of the most important goings-on among the people and things to which you were connected that included status updates, wall posts, photos and people tagged in photos, events, group activities and new connections. It was a complex technical undertaking, exceeding even what was required by the likes of Google’s search technologies. Constantly observing activity across your connections and determining which of the more than 1,500 daily updates available to the average user would be distilled down to the approximately 300 items that would be shown in order to increase the feeling of relevance and decrease the feeling of being overwhelmed required complex calculations using hundreds of pieces of data unique to you and to your engagement with Facebook generally and your connections specifically. It turns out, however, that wouldn’t be the hardest part.

Facebook News Feed launched on September 5, 2006. It did not go well. After the announcement of the feature early that Tuesday morning by Facebook’s first female engineer, Ruchi Sanghvi, a somewhat unexpected consequence quickly reared its head: News Feed had accomplished its purpose of making it easier to see what was going on across your connections, but in the process it had pushed the third rail issue of your privacy settings—which control who across the social network would see what about you—into the limelight.

While News Feed respected your existing privacy settings, seeing that photo you were tagged in, the relationship status update or group comment front and center on your home page instead of the relative backwaters of your profile page could be unsettling to some.

By the end of the day, Facebook groups—some numbering in the hundreds of thousands and seemingly oblivious to the irony of their rapid rise to prominence owing to the promotion in the very News Feed they were opposing—had formed against the change. Facebook boycotts were being suggested.

By 10 p.m., Zuckerberg himself had to respond. His note, titled “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,” is a microcosm of his approach to Facebook and its community. He acknowledged how the community is responding, restated News Feed’s purpose and the commitment to privacy settings—the slings and arrows of which Facebook continually endures as both its pioneer and largest purveyor—and continued, undaunted, toward the future. He knows that without an engaged community being served by the product, there is no connected future but does not sacrifice his belief in how best to move toward that future.

Later that week, Facebook released more granular privacy controls to both remind people of and give them more control over how content makes its way to their and other people’s News Feeds.

It was, however, implicitly clear that News Feed was here to stay.

Nearly a decade later, delivering over 200 million stories to screens worldwide every minute, Facebook’s News Feed has become one of the greatest media ever. Its “personal newspaper”—mine is very different from yours—is the crucial yin to the yang of Facebook’s focus on authentic identity across its users. Merely being connected to real people and things you know and care about (e.g., Friendster), or just having a constant stream of unfiltered news from sources you know less personally (e.g., Twitter), would not be as powerful.

Taken together, the combination of authentic identity and News Feed are responsible for Facebook’s unrivaled degree of engagement and size.

Once Every Waking Hour

You might have rolled your eyes at the suggestion that Facebook’s News Feed is one of the greatest media ever. Could it really be as important as television? The telephone? Newspapers? Music? E-mail? Google?

It could be, and in some ways it already is.

A medium is a means through which we sense (and possibly affect) one another and the world. With time spent on digital media starting to exceed time spent on any other medium—including television (and half of all adults and 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds use Facebook while watching TV¹)—back in 2013, it’s useful to take a closer look at how we sense and affect the world in digital. With you on one side and the world on the other, there are four media in between, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. The flow of information between you and the world

Closest to you are devices, such as your phone, tablet or computer, and pipes, such as your cellular provider or cable company. Closest to the world are content sources that engage in understanding and interpreting the world from organizations like The New York Times, Buzzfeed or Vice and Disney, Netflix or YouTube to public figures like Mark Cuban, Kim Kardashian or Barack Obama to a collection of particularly important people: your friends.

The layers of devices and channels closest to you are more or less replaceable with one another. Whether you have an Android phone or an iPhone or a computer and are on the Internet via Verizon or Comcast, the world isn’t appreciably different. The layer of content closest to the world has some big players, but none big enough to amount to significant global influence by themselves any longer (The New York Times is a paragon of journalism but is just one of hundreds of different observations of the world in your life).

The layer that makes the biggest difference to you nowadays actually consists of the lenses that help you make sense of the onslaught of information that the digital world has brought us. Seventy years ago, newspapers were your all-in-one device (paper), pipe (paperboy), lens (editor) and content (stories). Fifty years ago, the three national television networks offered a combined pipe (over-the-air broadcasts), lens (Walter Cronkite) and content (reporters), which you received at your device (television set). A quarter century ago, the arrival of two-way pipes (Internet) and interactive devices (PCs) made dedicated lenses both possible and necessary (Yahoo!’s directory and subsequent search engine) and in doing so downgraded millions of sources to “mere” content. Nothing in media, however, would rival the rise over the last decade of high-speed, wireless two-way pipes and devices (smartphones), which completed the ascension of lenses into a dominant position, particularly two classes of lenses and the dominant provider in each: (1) what you do when you know what you want (search, dominated globally by Google), and (2) what you do when you don’t know what you want (the implicit “What’s going on?” of social media, dominated globally by Facebook in the form of News Feed).

As much as you still have direct relationships with content—the likes of Netflix or your friends—lenses have a disproportionately large influence on how you sense the world, and it turns out that the two primary lenses are not equally important:

We access search on average three to five times a day, but Facebook on average 10 to 15 times a day. We don’t know what we want three times as often as we do know. We don’t know what we want roughly once every waking hour.

As a more specific example of the dominance of Facebook’s lens, take entertainment-related content: Facebook is the source of new information, information that people wouldn’t be aware of otherwise and information relevant to their interests for two to nearly three times as many people as the next closest digital source.

To see just how powerful the News Feed lens is for people and Facebook, consider this:

Facebook has summarily replaced portals: While Facebook has over 1 billion daily users (with 90% visiting via mobile), Yahoo’s home page—the former champion of lenses—has only 53 million² (just 20% of which visit on mobile).

The lens the Internet depends on the most is Facebook’s: According to parse.ly, in January and February of 2016, Facebook’s News Feed accounted for 41% of traffic referrals to the hundreds of news sites tracked by the service (all of Google accounted for 39% and the next closest source—Yahoo!—for a mere 4%). Even other giants depend most on Facebook: it generates more traffic to YouTube, which has 1 billion monthly users, than any other source, including all Google (YouTube’s parent company) sources combined.

Facebook plays an outsized role in how we consider new products: In a 2015 study, Facebook’s consumer insights team discovered that in the 24-day consideration period of subjects in the market for a new phone, they visited Facebook 201 times, search 23 times and the websites of the companies making the phones a mere two times.

Aside from its engaging, endless nature, News Feed has benefited from two giant forces during its decade of ascendency.

1. The shift to mobile: People’s shift to mobile as their favorite devices around the world—launched in earnest with the iPhone—has been nothing short of a revolution. Cisco now predicts that by 2020 there will be more people with mobile phones (5.4 billion) than electricity (5.3 billion) and running water (3.5 billion) and nearly twice as many as have cars (2.8 billion).

Riding, enabling or—best case—encouraging this trend is paramount to any player in the digital ecosystem, but most especially the lenses.

In ways even Zuckerberg and Cox could scarcely have foreseen in 2006, the endless vertical scrolling column of bite-sized visual stories in News Feed is utterly perfect for the handheld, thumb-controlled vertical form factor of our phones and the frequent short engagements we have with them. The forced focus on a single column in your hand, combined with the visceral feeling of flow provided by a touch-based interface, make for a near perfect physical manifestation of the abstract goal of News Feed to show information across your connections.

Looking backward from the comfort of 2016, it is clear that we went through an interface transition from using windows for desktop computing to using feeds for mobile that was rung in with Steve Jobs’ demonstration of touch-based inertial scrolling at the January 2007 launch of the iPhone.

Unlike typical desktop designs like portals with multiple columns and longer-form content, which found themselves struggling to transition to phones, News Feed became even more engaging as Facebook first built a mobile website in 2007 and then launched a mobile app—created by Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt—the day Apple launched its App Store in July 2008. According to analytics firm App Annie, as of September 2015 the Facebook app continued to rein globally as the most downloaded iPhone app ever.

However, it’s not just that the shift to mobile was a benefit to News Feed. To put a finer point on things, News Feed would have failed had it not been so well suited to mobile.

2. Scale as Benefit: The second force is an inversion of the typical challenges of content businesses. Growth is a burden for content businesses, impacting both quality and efficiency. Whether they are a news organization or an entertainment company, they have to generate more content at the same levels of quality we were used to when they were smaller and spend increasingly to do so, each additional effort carrying incremental risk of not hitting the bull’s-eye of our tastes as well as the one before it. Eventually, it becomes difficult to stay on top in the “hits business.”

A lens like Facebook News Feed gets better and more efficient as more people use it because more content from more people becomes available—for free—to choose from for the relatively constant number of stories that are served to you every day, and the fixed costs such as data centers, which play a much bigger role in technology businesses than peruser marginal costs, are amortized over more people generating more advertising revenue.

Lenses are two-sided marketplaces matching people with content. The marketplace gets paid to make the match while not incurring any costs for making the content or the roads that lead to the marketplace. While Google benefits from a similar two-sided dynamic and has the same people on one side of its marketplace as Facebook, Facebook has more content being generated on the other side of its marketplace as well as people coming to its marketplace more often.

News Feed’s rise to becoming the lens to your world—although not without its hiccups—has been meteoric. While many at Facebook have worked on it over the years—including long-time Facebook product managers and culture-keepers like Peter Deng, Will Cathcart and Adam Mosseri, Cox has been its constant and nurturing parent since birth.

Keeping Your Lens Clean, Well Lit, and Interesting

News Feed’s impact on the world is real and important. Yes, it tries to show you the viral video you’re likely to enjoy the most, but it bears much greater responsibilities. Responsibility for what it shows you. What it fails to show you. Whether it allows itself to be taken advantage of by spammers and click-baiters. Which kings it is making (hello, Buzzfeed). Which kings it is dethroning (goodbye, Zynga). Which causes it has helped, up to and including revolutions involving entire peoples and countries. And which it failed to give enough of a stage. Which moment of cyber-bullying it prevented through its peer-reporting tools and which it is not yet capable of interdicting. Facebook understands the gravity of this and has made News Feed’s goal and values explicit to explain the “why” of News Feed, not just the “what,” at http://newsfeed.fb.com (“Show you the stories that matter most to you,” “Friends and family come first,” “Your feed should inform,” “Your feed should entertain,” “A platform for all ideas,” “Authentic communication,” “You control the experience” and “Constant iteration”).

News Feed—and Cox as its parent—are responsible to you. And, as the thing making Facebook more engaging than any other service, the two are nearly entirely responsible for the well-being of the company. Facebook’s business and its ability to build the future Zuckerberg envisions is increasingly counting on Facebook’s many other products and efforts to be supported by News Feed in the way Google’s “moonshots” are made possible by its search business.

To live up to that lofty responsibility, News Feed’s algorithm, as well as its interface and abilities, is constantly evolving.

After beginning its life by merely understanding clicks, comments, shares, hiding and reported spam back in 2006, News Feed received a massive lift in capability with the arrival of the Like button in February 2009, which created nearly ten times as much engagement data—the News Feed algorithm’s oxygen—as mere comments had before it and was used roughly a trillion times (yes, a thousand billion times) in the first three years of its existence.

Over the years, understanding people’s behavior beyond simply engaging with a story got increasingly sophisticated, as Facebook took into consideration how long you dwelled on a story in your News Feed relative to the average amount of time you spend with all stories. It also began to account for clicks that didn’t signal relevance, such as click-bait headlines that got you to click on an article but whose contents failed to engage you, causing you to return quickly to Facebook, known as a “bounce.” Second-order effects like how quickly Likes on an item started to accumulate, whether links shared by your friends were also trending more broadly on Facebook and behavior around videos—at 8 billion views a day as of 2015, a crucial piece of News Feed—such as turning on sound, high-definition or full-screen options started to play a role in how quickly, as well as how high in your News Feed, items were shown.

Beyond just silently observing users, Facebook also started to engage people directly in assessing the quality of their News Feed with surveys of hundreds of thousands of users about which items in their News Feed they would actually prefer to see, as well as explicit features that allow you to unfollow certain people and things to avoid seeing items from them in News Feed and to specify whether you would like to see items from certain people or things first, or less.

To deal with both your reaction to a story and also the origin of that story when it comes from a Page—rather than a friend—you have connected with, Facebook has constructed sophisticated insights tools, provided best practices and even implemented rules around overly promotional content and the amount of text in images in order to reduce the amount of low-quality content that would run afoul of people’s expectations entering the system from publishers and businesses.

As an example of the subtlety of Facebook’s approach to the algorithm, consider their June 2016 announcement that content from friends and family would be given higher priority than content from the Pages of publishers and businesses. Consistent with News Feed’s value that “friends and family come first,” this introduced a significant increase in priority that a link from, say, The New York Times that your friend had shared would receive relative to The New York Times itself sharing that link. As obvious as this change appears on the surface—I would consider a link to the story shared by my friend more than the original story even if I am connected to The New York Times on Facebook—it carries with it a potentially negative impact on the unpaid distribution that publishers and businesses receive for their posts, possibly diminishing Facebook’s value to these participants and therefore their emphasis on operating on the platform and their business relationship with Facebook. Facebook has to continually trust that what is good for people will always be best for the platform and for all the participants on it.

But all of that is not enough for the most important lens on your world because sometimes you Like a baby photo because you feel socially obligated, not because you actually like it and don’t want to (and therefore shouldn’t) be shown more baby photos. So, in 2014 Facebook started to engage Facebook users in its ‘Feed Quality Panel,’ beginning with a pilot program of several hundred people in an office building in Knoxville, Tennessee, who work as contractors to provide extensive daily quantitative and qualitative reports on what they saw in their feed and—more importantly—what they actually wanted to see in their feed by rating dozens of their own News Feed stories on a scale from 1 to 5 and reordering the feed they saw the way they would have wanted to see it. The panel is so valuable that it has since been expanded around the world.

As all these new signals are turned into refinements of the algorithm, the changes are rolled out exceedingly carefully to Facebook’s gigantic user base.

It starts with an offline simulation, then testing among Facebook’s thousands of employees, followed by a small fraction—commonly 1%—of Facebook’s users, and finally a complete rollout, although even then a so-called holdout group is retained on the prior version of the algorithm to continue assessing impact. And 24×7, the News Feed team observes data from the News Feed, including engagement and time spent, and has alarms to detect any disturbances.

In addition to evolving how things are chosen for you in News Feed, the team is constantly looking to improve both what those things can be—from status updates to photos to videos to 360-degree videos and even the ability for people to broadcast live video, which was fast becoming another big draw for the kind of public and celebrity figures Facebook wants to keep active on its platform rather than lose to emergent ones like Twitter-owned Periscope or Snapchat and which could even lead to you watching TV, including the NFL, in your News Feed—as well as how you can engage with them.

The year 2016 marked an important time for both what you saw, and how you engaged with it as the company launched Instant Articles and Reactions.

Instant Articles are a way to bring richer, more interactive content from other web pages directly into your Facebook News Feed—and at much greater speed than mobile users are accustomed to due to the content being cached by Facebook ahead of people engaging with it—that had first been introduced in the well received but ultimately unsuccessful Paper app the company had launched in 2014. Beyond simply bringing more richness to News Feed, there is also a very real possibility that Instant Articles tighten Facebook’s stranglehold on “being the Internet”—or at least being perceived to be—as they bring more content into the Facebook environment considered less open than the Internet at large. To counter, Google has launched its own Accelerated Mobile Pages program, which features web pages using Google’s alternative to Instant Articles more prominently in Google’s search results, a benefit as appealing as appearing more quickly and richly in Facebook’s News Feed.

Expect to continue to see an endless arms race between Facebook and Google over how best to serve you when you know what you want (search/Google) and when you don’t (discovery/Facebook), including the long-term pursuit of ads that don’t feel like ads.

Facebook also introduced Reactions in News Feed, the first refinement of the Like button since its launch, which had been carefully considered by Cox and the team for years to allow for more expressive responses to stories (Like, Love, HaHa, Wow, Sad and Angry), while preventing the overly negative discourse the company had feared from the much discussed Dislike button. Beyond creating a feeling of more diverse expression when responding to something you see on Facebook, Reactions also have the long-term potential to refine Facebook’s understanding of what particular content—and people—mean to you and create an even more fitting selection of content for you in News Feed. Diversifying a signal Facebook gets from people billions of times per day also creates a new opportunity for better mutual understanding between people and advertisers whose ads will also have the new range of Reactions.

As with all changes, you can be sure Facebook will be careful and attentive to keeping your lens clean.

The Long Future of News Feed . . . and Chris Cox

By virtue of Zuckerberg and Cox’s focus and the team’s measurement, News Feed will only become a more engaging lens in terms of both time spent and actions taken. However, in the long-view world of Zuckerberg, instead of simply letting this big winner ride, they are already hedging for the future, even allowing for a distant time in which Facebook itself may not dominate but the mission of Facebook Inc. continues undaunted.

Whether it is feeds with different algorithms (e.g., Facebook-owned Instagram), new types of feeds like messaging products (e.g., Facebook-owned WhatsApp, Messenger and human-assisted artificial intelligence service M), new interfaces for future screens with no edges (e.g., Facebook-owned Virtual Reality headset maker Oculus) or even telepathic messaging in the distant, scoff-at-your-own-risk future, Zuckerberg and Cox have their bases covered when it comes to being the lenses on your world (more on all that in Chapters 9, 13 and 15).

And as has been the case since 2006, you can count on every Facebook product having in its design a little bit of what Chris Cox is like in person: step back so that other people can step forward.