How popular social media features were conceived?
Introduction
What were you doing before reading this article? Chances are you were scrolling through the news feed of some app, watching stories posted by your friends or checking how many people have seen and liked your posts.
If social media were a religion, it would be the largest religion in the world with 4.33 billion users or 55% of the world population.
This wild success can be largely attributed to its popular features that are a result of a combination of technology, design and human psychology. Through this article, I attempt to quench my curiosity of how features like news feed, the like button, infinite scroll and stories came into being.
- News Feed
While it is controversial who actually invented the news feed, with different platforms like Facebook and Flickr claiming the rights. But it was most certainly made popular by Facebook. FB launched the news feed on Sep 5, 2006. In this podcast, ex-VP design of FB, Julie Zhuo explains the thought process behind this feature.
Earlier the users had to go to each of their friends profile to check if there was any change, like have they added any new music albums, have they made new friends etc. FB team realised it was kind of cumbersome and a lot of value can be unlocked if this info was brought to the forefront.
Soon after the release, there was a huge backlash from users around privacy concerns. There were dedicated groups on FB to protest the feature. It is ironic that the very reason these protests caught on so quickly was that most users came to know about it from their news feed. Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged this backlash in a FB blog post titled Calm Down. Breathe. We hear You. Newsfeed was not rolled back and instead, more privacy controls were introduced allowing users to choose what they want to see in their feed.
Newsfeed was the feature that really put FB on the map and it became a viral hit. Since then a lot of changes have been made in how the content is organized in the news feed. One of the big changes was algorithmically sorting content on the basis of user’s preferences and not time.
2. The Like button
Originally called the Awesome button, the iconic Like button of Facebook has a fascinating story. In this Quora thread, Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of Advertising and Pages at Facebook (and known simply as “Boz”) explains how the iconic Like button came into being.
The idea was born as part of a project code-named “Props” in July 2007. The team was experimenting with different symbols like a plus sign, stars and a thumbs up as a way to allow users to express positive reaction.
This feature received keen interest from the feed and ads team. It could enable the news feed team to improve feed ranking and could help the ads team in improving CTR. When the prototype was finally proposed to Mark Zuckerberg, he gave it a thumbs down. He had concerns that introducing the like button would cannibalize the use of the share and comment feature as now users can simply like the post and won't put extra efforts into sharing and writing a comment. These concerns stalled the further progress of this feature for some time.
This project(now known as the “cursed” project) was revived in December 2008. But this time the team armed themselves with data scientist Itamar Rosenn, who provided data to show that a like button wouldn’t reduce the number of comments on a post. — that, in fact, it increased the number of comments, as likes would boost a popular post up through the News Feed. Zuckerberg’s fears that a lower-impact feedback style would discourage higher value interactions like reposting or commenting were shown to be unfounded. Finally, on 9 February 2009, “like” launched with a blog post, “I like this”.
In 2016, FB launched reactions. Now apart from liking people could react to a post in other emotions like laughing, angry, sad etc.
3. Infinite Scroll
Aza Raskin, the son of Jef Raskin(known for his contribution to the Macintosh Project) is credited for the invention of the infinite scroll in 2006. At the time he was working at Humanized- a computer user interface consultancy. He stumbled upon the idea when he observed a problem with different aggregators.
An aggregator is just a program that grabs syndication feeds from the websites you read and shows you what’s new on them. All these aggregators were very complex and non-intuitive. They had lots of modes, panes, hierarchical trees and scroll bars. A user has to stop and think about navigation each time they moved from one article to another.
So the team at Humanized reader invented an infinite page that allows you to endlessly scroll and discover content. As Aza Raskin himself puts it, “We call it Humanized History, and we’re hoping that you don’t even notice what it is because that’s sort of its point: to let you spend more time reading, and less time thinking about navigation.”
This feature was quickly noticed and adopted by social media companies. In this video, Aza Raskin explains how he came up with this idea(watch from 22:00)
4. Stories
Considered as the brainchild of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, stories is now one of the most popular social media features that were ruthlessly copied across social media platforms from Instagram to Twitter.(At least Twitter came up with a creative name- fleets)
“Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion — not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.”- Evan Spiegel
Snapchat was different from other social media apps as it allowed you to share imperfect moments with your friends without worrying as they would disappear as and when you want. In 2013, Snapchat realised that people not only want to share disappearing photos and messages in personal chat but also want to broadcast them to their friends. And Snapchat stories were born.
People share their most polished selfies, sunsets and meals on Instagram/FB and therefore the sharing frequency is low as people wait for that special occasion before they share something. This the same reason why the use of stories exploded. It allowed users to share their goofy, silly and stupid photos that were not good enough for their permanent profile but were share-worthy at the moment.
The future
The future of Social Media looks exciting with upcoming innovations in the field of social commerce, Virtual/Mixed reality and short video format. I hope that the new breed of social media features would be less about increasing user engagement, and more about ensuring privacy and user well being.
Thanks for reading!
About the Author
Anmol Agarwal is a Product Associate at Toppr. He loves to talk about user behaviour, actions and motivations and how can they be simplified. Contact him anytime for a candid chat on product, technology, history and politics.
Email- anmol3478.agarwal@gmail.com
