News Not Noise: Socially Aware Information Filtering



News Not Noise: Socially Aware Information Filtering

It is also possible that as this question was quite time-
consuming and was placed at the end of the questionnaire that
some respondents lost patience with classifying their friends. It
may also indicate that respondents found it difficult to classify
their friends. There were several comments from those who
initially tested the questionnaire that indicated that they found
this question demanding, and also that they felt awkward and
uncomfortable in having to categorize friends in this way.

News Feed

The “News Feed” is Facebook's name for the aggregated view
of news by and about all of the user's friends. This view is the
first page that users see when logging in, and can be easily
reached from any other page by clicking on the Facebook logo.
This prominent position within the information architecture
implies that Facebook see this feature as a key means of
navigation through the service's content. However, interest in
the aggregated view of all news about the user's friends (the
“News Feed”) was very low; the majority of respondents
reported finding one-quarter or less of the News Feed items
interesting, with just 14% of respondents reporting interest in
over half of their News Feed items. It would seem a plausible
hypothesis that users would add their closest friends to their
online social network first and that a small number of friends
should indicate that the user is more selective about who they
add. If this were true, a user with fewer friends would be
interested in a greater proportion of the items in their News
Feed. However, we found no significant correlation between
these factors.

Photographs were widely considered the most interesting type
of social media, with an average rating of 3.9 stars and the vast
majority (92%) giving three stars or more. Friends' intention to
attend events was generally considered interesting, with around
half (54%) giving three or four stars. Friend's actions on
Facebook were widely considered the least interesting, with
almost all (96%) giving three stars or under. Interest in the
News Feed was significantly related to interest in profile
changes and friends actions (e.g. joining a group, using an
application). This suggests that other stories may currently be
over-represented in the News Feed, contributing to the low
average level of interest.

Respondents reported equal interest in close friends they see
regularly and old friends who they don't see regularly, with an
average star rating of 3.4 for each. There is no significant
difference between any of the four most interesting types of
friends. Respondents were significantly more interested in
those they don't know well but who they see regularly than
those they don't see regularly, with the most respondents
choosing 3 stars and 2 stars respectively. This suggests the
hypothesis that a user's interest in other Facebook users is
influenced by the likelihood of the users meeting off-line.
Younger users were significantly more interested in new
friends. Almost all users (91%) gave star ratings of 3 or below
for those friends who don't fit into the suggested categories,
which is significantly lower than all other categories. This
confirms that the categories chosen have a strong relation to
their level of interest in a given user.

The same 148 people were invited to participate in a second
survey, to which 20 responded (13.5% response rate).
Participants were asked whether they have used the feedback
buttons on the News Feed (which have been removed since the
research was conducted). Three-quarters of respondents stated
that they had never used them, 10% had used them once or
twice and 15% had used them “sometimes”. No respondents
stated that they used them regularly. Of those respondents who
had not used the feedback buttons, the majority (60%) of
respondents said that they hadn't noticed them. This is
understandable as the icons were very small and faint. About a
quarter (27%) of respondents didn't feel the need to use them
and 13% didn't understand their function. Of those that had
used the feedback buttons, none felt that they'd had any effect
on which items were shown in the News Feed.

Figure 3: Likely interest in news item, by category of friend

2.1 Key findings

Usage of Facebook is generally fast and frequent, similar to
email. This does not normally allow enough time to consume
all news by all the user's friends, so tools to help the user find
the most interesting news are important. Yet the satisfaction
with the aggregated news feed provided by Facebook, which is
typical of those provided by social networking services, is very
low. This confirms that there is an important problem in this
area. Keeping up-to-date with current friends and re-
connecting with old friends are the two most important reasons
for using Facebook, but although they seem like similar tasks,
they differ dramatically in the "amount of detail" the user is
interested in - the user is likely to want to have their attention
drawn to a smaller number of stories about old friend's lives,
that are of more significance. Users have almost twice as many
"old" friends as "current" friends: displaying a random selection
of news will show more from old friends. The proportion of
old friends will increase as the user adds new friends, as
deleting friends seems to happen rarely (as previously
discussed) and research shows that the number of close friends
at any one time stays relatively constant, possibly limited by
social cognitive abilities [7]. Interviewees and survey
respondents both admitted that many of those on their "friends"
list were not people that they knew well. This may be
attributed to the apparent social stigma associated with refusing
friend requests or deleting friends from the list. Respondents
reported being significantly less interested in these people.

3. REDESIGNING THE NEWS FEED

The survey attempted to get potential users to classify friends
by the type of relationship they share, with only limited success.
Another way to look at different friendships is to look at the
context in which the friendship develops, such as the
workplace, place of study or a club or organisation.

We used a force-directed visualization, where individuals who
share friends or co-appear in photographs are shown closer
together, and this reveals definite groups corresponding to
different social contexts, such as classmates or work colleagues.
This suggests that those who share friendships are also share
other similarities, which is supported by Galton [4], who
obtained correlational data showing that in married couples,
spouses are similar in many respects. In turn, the sharing of
stories and information is important in bringing people together.
Brown & Duguid [1] argue that rather than the information

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