One of the more annoying things about Facebook is how your News Feed gets clogged and spammed and smacked with stuff you don’t care about. Facebook is trying to fix that by limiting what apps can post stuff to your Feed.
Specifically, apps will be limited to only post on your feed when they use officially Facebook sanctioned actions like Like, Follow, Listen, Read or Watch. However, it’s not all pretty music about streamlining your Feed, Facebook is going to make things a lot more annoying when it comes to Facebook postings with images and location. It’s going to be a lot, um, HUGER. Here’s how Facebook explains it:
In early tests, the new image-led stories have shown 70% more clicks for apps that provide high quality, relevant imagery with low spam rates. In certain cases, we have seen these stories generate up to 50x more Likes than equivalent story types from before. The new location stories provide double-digit gains in distribution to apps.
Bigger postings get more feedback from Facebook users! Duh. So although Facebook is eliminating apps from using unauthorised actions to post on your Feed, they’re almost encouraging apps to use image and location features to get on the wall because they’ll be much more prominent. It sure seems like two steps forward one step back in cleaning up the News Feed. [Facebook]