On any social network, it’s fairly easy to get lost. You may curate your own content by generating a list of followed, friended and liked entities and people, but that list can become very cluttered over time. Facebook, however, is testing out a solution to that problem. Some users of Facebook’s mobile app are seeing a new option that allows them to customize their news feed based on categories. The categories and subcategories on offer go quite deep, allowing users, for example, to specify what types of entertainment they like or what sort of travel news and packages they want to see in their feed.
The categories on offer range from things like music and TV to travel and food, covering the gamut of, for the most part, whatever users may want to see in their feed. Sub-selections such as genres of music, types and ethnicities of food and genres of video games are on offer to make the resulting feed even more personal. With customization this deep, it’s entirely possible to have a large group where no two feeds are exactly alike. Considering the fact that Facebook also uses artificial intelligence to figure out what to show its users, how much to show and when to show it, the items yielded by these deep customization options may become more detailed and specific over time.
For now, testing of the feature seems to be showing up for random users with no real pattern. Facebook has not specified any way to sign up for the feature, or when the test may get a wider rollout, let alone when or if the final version of the feature will roll out on a larger scale and if it will look anything like the feature’s current form. A similar option exists for customizing the advertisements you see on your feed, self-curated and then further curated and sorted by A.I. Given the recent trouble Facebook has gotten into over the use of human curators for their Trending Topics feature, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see A.I. taking care of curation for this new feature as well, should it see a wider rollout.
