In an announcement made today by Facebook, your newsfeed will now become more focused on your friends and family and not so much on that really great cat video… Although it was a really great cat video…

What is the newsfeed?

In 2006 Facebook launched what they coined as the “newsfeed”. The newsfeed has come to be the most important part of Facebook, it’s where we all spend our time.

When you open the Facebook app on your phone, it’s the default landing page every time. You scroll through what seems to be an endless amount of information shared by friends and family, some of it personal, and some of it not-so-personal.

The History of the Newsfeed

When the newsfeed first launched, it was a chronological list of updates from your friends and family. You were easily able to see every-single-post from your friends and family because you would scroll backwards in time till you saw the last post you saw before you closed out Facebook the last time.

There were no ads. There were no spammy posts. It was just pure, clean, friendly shares of stuff you didn’t really care about. It was glorious.

Then a lot of people started signing up for Facebook, and we all started to have a lot of friends. With all those additional friends came the added load of posts to view in the newsfeed. This made it hard to see “everything” in a chronological order because there was just tooooo much to see.

Facebook saw this happening and realized that chronological just isn’t going to cut it anymore. They knew that if they were going to keep their users engaged they needed to figure out how to show the users the “best” posts up top. In 2009 we entered the world of the algorithmic newsfeed.

The algorithmic newsfeed was not very well received. We all hated it! But it was a necessary change and over the years we have become accustomed to it. There has always been the option to change back to the chronological order, now called “recent posts” but it’s pretty hidden and no one really uses it.

The algorithm has been updated numerous times since 2009, constantly trying to keep what they call their core values a priority.

The Evolution of Business Pages in the Newsfeed

In the beginning, business pages didn’t exist. Some of us were tricky and used personal pages branded for a business account, which worked great in the chronological newsfeed. Our posts were seen every time we posted something, it was glorious.

Facebook didn’t let that happen for long, though, and soon created the “pages” feature. Pages were for businesses or topics or pretty much anything other than a person, to have a place to post their thoughts and ideas on things.

In the early pages days, we were still graced with the chronological newsfeed so all of the posts from our business pages would show up to every single person that liked your page. Ahhh… those were the days.