Why Facebook Won't Give You a Straight-Up News Feed

Ah, the news feed, Facebook's party central. Purveyor of addictive updates on friends and former acquaintances. And ground zero in the battle for what the social network was, is, and where it's going.

What shows up in that news feed, an interview with the relevant manager at Facebook reveals, is the result of an endless chess game of algorithmic amendments by the company trying to please its users — as well as endless rounds of complaints from those users.

Case in point: earlier this week, a programmer uncovered a Facebook URL that appeared to show your feed unfiltered, algorithm free, with all of your friends' updates in chronological order. That was news to Facebook, which has no idea where the page came from.

"That was not something that was ever live," News Feed Product Manager Will Cathcart told Mashable. "It was a mix of our current algorithms and an old approach. It was ranking by [interesting] friends, rather than by which posts were likely to be interesting.

"As soon as we heard about it, we turned it off."  Read more…