Report: Your Facebook News Feed Will Soon Know A Lot More About You

Your News Feed could soon be combining all sorts of info about you.

Your News Feed could soon be combining all sorts of info about you.

The Facebook News Feed is that place where people you haven’t seen since high school post endless photos of their kids, and occasionally share sage wisdom in the form of a quote from Gandhi or Lemmy from Motorhead. But a new report says the Feed is about to become more personalized. Perhaps too much so.

BusinessInsider reports that Facebook’s VP of Products Chris Cox has been working on a News Feed update that would use whatever information it can discern about the user in order to provide the content that would most likely be of interest to each user.

According to the site’s source, the News Feed will constantly be reviewing information about the user — the “user’s friends, purchase history, Web history, location, and much more” — to determine what items to highlight.

This would seem to mean, according to BusinessInsider, that Facebook would be pooling whatever info it can glean from all your connected devices: Phones, computers, TVs, etc.

Facebook is also looking to knock down the wall between outside content providers and Facebook users.

For instance, for Consumerist to post a story on Facebook, we have to publish the story to our Facebook page (or have users post the link on their pages), from which it can be shared by followers.

But the BusinessInsider sources say that Cox is working on a way that would effectively replace a site’s Facebook page with a redesigned version of the actual site that would combine the content with the social functions available on Facebook.

“As long as you format your page correctly, we’ll show it to the people who will click on it,” says one source.

The report points out that a number of the possible changes being discussed to the News Feed would actually push people to sources outside of Facebook, which is apparently just fine with the company.

See, rather than force people to watch videos or read stories in Facebook, the sources say that Facebook wants to be viewed by advertisers and content providers as a place that will direct traffic to sites.

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