Facebook will start favoring stories shared explicitly in users' news feeds over auto-shared stories shared by third-party apps.
The social networking giant clarified that is not planning on stopping these auto-shares entirely, but will reduce their prevalence on the news feed. Users who click "Share to Facebook" from other apps and add their own content to the post will have entries that show up more than those who enable a setting on third-party apps that shares status updates to Facebook automatically.
Facebook has done an about-face since it came up with the Open Graph protocol in 2011, which allowed developers to let users post their activities on the site from other apps automatically. However, the feature quickly became too much, filling up the Ticker and news feed with content that people were skipping through. Facebook decided to act on the users' reactions by changing its feed algorithm.
Facebook's Peter Yang shared the company's findings in a blog post that detailed the way users gravitate toward explicitly shared stories more, and are often confused by those shared automatically.
"Over the past year, the number of implicitly shared stories in News Feed has naturally declined. This decline is correlated with how often people mark app posts as spam, which dropped by 75% over the same period. In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in news feed and Ticker over implicitly shared stories," he wrote.
The company is now urging users to use explicit sharing options, citing Instagram as an example of an app that stopped sharing photos to Facebook automatically. Instead, users were prompted to write a caption for their photo before posting it to their news feed.
Aside from this new update, Facebook is also focusing on other features such as Messenger, which started displaying app content in conversation threads, making things more personal for users. Send to Mobile now helps developers drive traffic to mobile apps by sending users notifications when they log in to websites to install the corresponding apps. The Like button will be coming to mobile apps as well, along with a new Share dialog for the web that lets users tag friends and locations.
