Facebook: What Does “Most Recent” Mean To You?

Does Facebook’s “Most Recent” news feed deliver results based on user behavior? If so, this is probably one of the best kept secrets by the Facebook team. Although I can’t find specific research on the topic, I can lend you my insight from some haphazard research as a user. Through consistent analysis of my personal feed I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, the “Most Recent” feed includes behavioral modifications in its algorithm.

I’ll walk you through a recent example. “Janice” is a friend of mine that I haven’t contacted, whose profile I haven’t viewed, and whom I haven’t seen tagged in any photos. She happens to send me a message through Facebook: “Hey, Nick. Long time, we should catch up, I just finished my latest photography portfolio and think you’d really dig it.”

It’s nice to hear from Janice – we haven’t spoken since high school. After responding, I visit her profile, check out her current status, and casually peruse her Facebook life. From there, I see that another old friend, “Steven”, recently posted a status update that he’s sick of the weather. Janice rebutted, noting that the rain is a great break from the heat. Her interaction with Steven is the reason I’m able to view his update on Janice’s wall.

I click into Steven’s profile and similarly do some scrolling and reminiscing. Whilst traveling down memory lane and satisfying an internal dialogue (what’s he been up to? where’s she living these days? etc.) my digital actions of clicking, responding, and viewing have created a new and unique trail of information from Janice to Me to Janice to Steven.

QUESTION: Will this update from a friend appear in my "Most Recent"? Scroll down to find out!

This is where I believe Facebook’s algorithm begins to track behavior based on actions to populate a different set of results in my ‘Most Recent’ news feed. You see, the next day I get to work and the first thing I do is check Facebook (who doesn’t?) – and sitting there in my ‘Most Recent’ news feed are various updates and comments from Facebook friends including Janice and Steven.

It struck me as relevant, but piqued my curiosity as I hadn’t recalled ever seeing Steven’s prior update on the weather in my feed. I clicked into Steven’s profile and saw he had a few recent updates in the past couple of days. Going back through my ‘Most Recent’ history (which only goes back about 3 or 4 days FYI) proved that Steven’s earlier updates had never appeared in my feed.

It took these digital actions between my account and Steven’s for him to appear in my news feed – and I’m assuming I also appeared in his ‘Most Recent’ feed. But did I, if I only viewed his information but didn’t interact with him directly?

Either way…there’s obviously more going on there than simply “Most Recent”. Is this good? Is this bad? I can’t answer that question for you…but I’ve always assumed it’d simply be the most recent activity from everyone in my Friends list, and that might once in a while spark interactions with folks I very rarely see or talk to. But if Janice hadn’t sent me that message, it’s unlikely I would have connected with Steve otherwise (or seen his grippingly important update on the weather, natch). What I would like to know is how exactly the Facebook team is determining who is appears in my ‘Most Recent’ news feed?

ANSWER: Nope!

The two pictures I posted are an example from my account. In this example, It proves that not all updates are posted to your ‘Most Recent’ feed. As in this case, a friend posted a comment in reference to Battlestar Galactica on Monday at 9:48, but in my ‘Most Recent’ feed, that comment never appeared.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Papa

Inspired by Russ’ post a few months ago about his dad, I’ve been thinking about the things I learned from my father.  This Father’s Day, I woke up early to run to the bakery and pick up some goodies for brunch, and this blog post started to form. I would never have time to document everything Papa has taught me through life or how I value them today, but two important lessons are below. The first is one of the secrets to a happy life and the second lives at the core of the design process.

Lesson #1: Leave No Baguette Untorn

Between 1974 and the early 80′s, we had a common Saturday morning routine. Around 7AM, Papa would stick his head in the bedroom my brother and I shared and whisper very loudly, “Paul, Philip, are you awake yet?” Although this sounded like a question, it actually meant, “Get up, get dressed, half the day has gone and there are things to do.” By 7:30, we were standing at the counter of the only French bakery in suburban Philadelphia, buying the weekend’s supply of baguettes and croissants. As a treat, we’d order 3 pain-au-chocolats. You may know them better as chocolate croissants.

Leave No Baguette Untorn

Back in the car, the pain-au-chocolats would disappear in a shower of pastry flakes. Once they were done, we would wait for my father to reach into the bag and tear off the end of one of the warm baguettes before we followed suit. Baguette + Car = Snack is a rule I follow to this day. My mother, my loving wife, and my brothers- and sisters-in-law have all learned to live with the fact that a Charron is incapable of delivering a stick of bread unharmed.

It is important to understand that Papa emigrated from France to the US in his late teens. Here, he went to college, joined the army, became a citizen, married Mom and they raised a family. His patriotism, like that of many who choose to be an American, runs deeper than many natural born Americans. I am grateful, however, that he never shed the culinary side of his upbringing. A true Frenchman knows that good bread is one of the secrets to happiness. After all, you never know when you’ll get hit by a bus…you may as well be eating good bread when it happens.

Lesson #2: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

After the bakery, we would often head to the appliance repair shop. Here we’d pick up a belt, motor, thermostat, or switch for Papa’s nemesis: the 1973 GE electric dryer.

It still lives: the bain of Papa's existence. Photo: courtesy Papa and his new Blackberry

Papa is an electrical engineer. More specifically, he worked as an aerospace engineer. Due to the top-secret nature of most of his work, I’ll never know the specifics of his job. I do know that he knew astronauts and he designed things that orbit the earth. Despite these accomplishments, he could never permanently repair that damn dryer.

So, over the course of a decade, I spent many weekends in the laundry room absorbing Papa’s critical thinking and problem solving skills. The repetition made it stick. Mr. Miagi had “Wax on, wax off.” Papa had, “Hold the flashlight.” Here’s how it worked:

Step 1 – Identification and Initial Diagnosis

Mom would say, “The dryer doesn’t work.” Papa would begin to diagnose the problem with a few questions: What isn’t happening? Does it still get hot? Is it spinning? Does it make a sound? As frustrating as this must have been for Mom, he started from the beginning. No question was too stupid. Once he had a general idea of the condition, we’d head to the laundry room to work on Step 2.

Step 2 – Analysis and Verification

We would pull the dryer away from the wall, disconnect the vent, unplug the beast, remove the service panel, test the suspect component with a voltmeter, remove the faulty part, and get a good night’s sleep. Even though you had a good idea for what the problem was – you had a bevy of tools to make sure you were fixing the right thing. At 8 years old, Papa was walking me through circuit diagrams. By 10, they kind of made sense. From 23 to 40, I have been drawing flowcharts on whiteboards to help clients improve their own processes.

Step 3 – Repair

After picking up the much-needed weekend necessities of bread and cheese, we’d buy the replacement parts and head home to make the repair. Installation is often the quickest part of the process.

Step 4 – Testing

After installation, we’d pull out the voltmeter to see if the circuit was behaving correctly. Then we’d partially reassemble the drier. Before closing up and reconnecting the vent  - we would plug it in to make sure it worked. If something still isn’t working – head back to Step 1. Testing is an incremental process. If you test at the very end and discover the problem persists or that you caused a new problem, it’s a lot more work to re-dis-assemble the thing. Test in stages and you waste less time, energy and frustration.

Design Is Problem Solving

This process and the rules around it are no different than what I do every day at work. Design is problem solving. Regardless of whether you’re fixing a dryer or helping a client solve a business challenge, the core of the process is universal. I know that the steps that put satellites in space and kept a dryer alive for almost forty years are going to help our clients.

My folks are moving soon and Papa promised that the dryer isn’t going with them. That’s OK. The dryer has paid its dues and the ol’ man deserves to sleep in on Saturdays.

The PROTECT IP Act: What You Need to Know

If you’re a regular reader, you know that the Think Blog is generally where we expound on ideas that are impacting our lives as Experience Designers. For this post, though, I’d like to take a step back and talk about something that is going to impact your life. End of sentence. No qualifier. This will impact your life.

Unless you’re an über geek of the political or technical variety, you probably haven’t heard of the PROTECT IP Act currently making it’s way through Congress (or its prior, defeated, incarnation COICA). The intent of this bill is to give the US government (and private parties) new powers to halt online infringements of intellectual property, especially in regards to domains registered outside the US. No problems so far, right?

The issue is how these new powers are described, enacted, and enforced.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Brad?"

Quickly, let’s talk about why this applies only to domains registered outside the US. Simply, there is ample legislation protecting IP from infringements from within our borders. Between the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and the Department of Homeland Security’s recent seizure of “offending” domains (an act of questionable legality, some would say), there are plenty of tools for IP holders to prosecute alleged violations of their rights within the US. That same action becomes difficult when there is no US registrant of the domain in question.

The solution posed by PROTECT IP (and previously COICA) is to wipe those allegedly offending domain names from the collective indexes of any “domain name system server” (we don’t need to get into it here, but the vague nature of this definition is troubling by itself), thus rendering the site effectively non-existent…unless you happen to know its IP address…or they change domain names…or use non-filtered DNS servers…etc. As many have shown, this would encourage a huge fracturing of the DNS system which essentially ensures that when I type “www.thinkbrownstone.com”, my browser knows at what 10-digit IP address TBI’s website lives. Needless to say, this approach has some faults.

To better illustrate, here’s an example:

I’m a law-abiding Swede with a fantastic idea for a new website that will allow people to post images, videos, and other kinds of media celebrating the culinary masterpiece that is the pancake (also accepted: crêpes, pfannkuchen, pannenkoeken, palacinka, and others). We’ll call it Pancakr. Let’s assume that my site begins to take off and I manage to get VC funding, despite the lawyers’ newfound trepidation of running afoul of PROTECT IP. Pancakr goes viral and everyone is posting pics of their latest quick-bread conquest. Unfortunately, many of the pics from the US feature PancakePuss, a trademarked character of the ISLOP restaurant chain. I should also mention that because Pancakr has gone so insanely viral, sites are popping up all over the Web with Pancakr related (and unlicensed) merch. PancakePuss is particularly popular, especially on t-shirts.

ISLOP is unhappy to be missing out on the royalties, but because all this activity is being done by non-US actors, the PROTECT IP Act is their only viable option. The Justice Department orders all domain name servers, ISPs, search engines, and social networks to stop redirecting to a host of sites accused of violating ISLOP’s IP. Pancakr is on that list, despite the fact that its biggest “crime” was providing the ability for people to link to their favorite pancake photos. Two years pass as we litigate our way through the judicial system, finally winning reinstatement in the DNS catalogue. Not that it matters at this point. Honestly, the investors would have been smart to drop the case and just move on to the next big thing. Two months, two years, two hundred years…they’re all the same when you’re vying for a sliver of the 21st Century attention-span. Oh, and those PancakePuss t-shirts? They’re still selling like hotcakes all over the web.

OK…a bit silly…greatly over-simplified…but you get the point. Wide nets, presumption of guilt, half-baked solutions built on tenuous technical knowledge, and a blatant disregard for free speech make for sloppy, ineffective, and downright dangerous law.

To clarify even further, here’s why this is going to impact you (assuming you use the Internet or participate in 21st Century Society).

• This is a Ready, Fire, Aim approach. Domains would be guilty until proven innocent.
• It makes linking to material that may be copyrighted (see point #1 above) cause enough for shuttering. Do you like YouTube? eBay? Flickr? Imagine them getting funding in their nascent years under this Act. Goodbye innovation.
• The Internet, to date, has been revolutionary in that it is truly world-wide and without borders. PROTECT IP would end this by creating a “US-approved” subset of the Internet. One can easily see how this Balkanization would quickly spread and the damage it would cause.
• As a society, we value creativity and try to protect it. However misdirected PROTECT IP is, that is the right and good intent that I believe Senator Leahy is trying to uphold with his bill. There are other societies who value conformity and obedience. Where is our moral credibility to denounce their Internet restrictions when we do the same?

You could (and perhaps should, given it’s potential impact) spend hours reading up on PROTECT IP. I similarly could spend many more hours writing about it. Let’s make a deal instead. If you still have questions, read the links I’ve included in this post. If you  want more, just search “PROTECT IP”. Once you’re satisfied, contact your Representative and Senator and tell them what you think (pro or con). Ideally, write them a real paper letter or give them a call (email is still kind of a second-class citizen in terms of impact). If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that a lot of people taking very small actions can have a huge impact. Let’s get all Groupon up on this thing!

I’m sending letters to my Congressmen today. Won’t you?
(seriously…do it…they will hear you)

Find your Representative: http://www.house.gov/representatives/

Find your Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

P.S. Big thanks to Leo Laporte and his TWiT podcast for turning me onto this issue!

A High School Internship at Think Brownstone

When I was little, my dad worked at a consulting firm.  He was in a project management role and worked with designers, business analysts, and information architects.  It was my first exposure to this area of the working world and I realized that it could be an area of interest to me.

Flash forward 8 years – I’m a senior in high school and looking for somewhere to intern for my senior project.  I was brainstorming ideas with my dad and he suggested his old friends that were now working at Think Brownstone.  Right away I thought it was a perfect idea.  They would be a fun group of people to spend time with and I’d always been interested in the problem solving and usability part of business.

Presenting To The Think Brownstone Crew

So I started my internship. I sat in on all types of different meetings – everything from insurance companies to non-profit organizations.  Most of the time the meetings were long and pretty confusing, but it helped me learn a lot more about what Think Brownstone is all about.  I learned that they are basically problem solvers, and they apply the design process to almost any business problem.

This opportunity has taught me a great deal about this really interesting type of work and I want to learn more.  Overall, it was a really good experience!