Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, and Tom Alison, one of his top lieutenants, were discussing how they wanted to reshape Facebook for the future of social networking.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who had grown Facebook from a dorm room project to a $1.5 trillion company that he renamed Meta, wanted to bring back some of the original rationale for the social network, or what he called “OG Facebook” vibes, Mr. Alison said in an interview. After years of adding features, the executives felt that some of Facebook’s key functions were being drowned out.
So they asked themselves: Why not try building some features that resembled the Facebook of yore a bit more?
On Thursday, Meta did just that with a simple tweak. The company said the Facebook app would now include a separate news feed for users that featured posts shared exclusively by people’s friends and family.
The feature, called the Friends Tab, will replace a tab in the app that showed new friend requests or suggested friends. Friends Tab will instead show a scrolling feed of posts, such as photos, video stories, text, birthday notifications and friend requests. For now, it will be available to Facebook users only in the United States and Canada.
“This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” said Mr. Alison, who is head of the Facebook app. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”
The new feed is a sharp departure from the way social media has evolved over the past decade. The rise of apps like TikTok habituated users to seeing posts in their feeds from influencers and content creators, who were often people they had never met. Other companies followed suit. Meta’s apps, which also include Instagram, began leaning more heavily on recommended content to keep people engaged for longer periods.
Now people view apps like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok as something more akin to television — a lean-back experience fueled by a smaller number of creators who produce hours of entertainment for the rest of the internet to consume.
Not everyone has welcomed the shift. When Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, it was aimed at helping college students connect with their friends on campus. As the app grew more popular, it became about helping every user keep up to date with posts from friends and family.
So when Mr. Zuckerberg announced in 2022 that Meta would insert recommended content on Facebook from people who were not connected to the user, many users revolted. Many initially found the recommended content — which relied on artificial intelligence to surface suggestions — jarring. After some criticism, Mr. Zuckerberg slightly scaled back the amount of such content added into people’s Facebook feeds.
Still, that did not stop Meta from embracing algorithmically recommended content. In recent years, more of people’s feeds on Facebook and Instagram became dominated by creators, businesses and brands. Recommended content like Reels, Meta’s video product, led people to spend more time on the apps, the company has said.
Meta has no plans to stop adding recommended content to users’ feeds, Mr. Alison said in the interview. For now, the company does not expect the Friends Tab to be more popular than the Home feed of recommended content.
And more changes to Facebook are likely coming. Meta plans to introduce other features and updates to Facebook in the coming year to make social media still “feel social,” Mr. Alison said.
“It is, frankly, core to Facebook,” he said.
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