Facebook last week announced another new app, this one is a news curator called Pages.
The app, designed to supplement the myriad of Facebook and Facebook-owned apps (Instagram anyone?) curates in one place news articles shared by the sites users and does so outside the newsfeed.
For both publishers and users this might seem good on the surface, publishers can break out of the din of the newsfeed and users who want news have a dedicated place on Facebook to find it and those who want to avoid the news can be (theoretically) be relieved of it in their newsfeed. Unfournatly none of this is probably true.
Facebook is about ranking. Facebook ranks posts, pictures, links, websites and yes even users. Inherent in Facebook’s ranking are winners and losers and there is no reason to think that Pages will be any different. Because of this the select users who opt-in to Pages will only see a small subset of content algorithmically chosen, but with a twist.
That twist, unlike newsfeed that relies on Edgerank to fill a user’s newsfeed, Paper adds what the Wall Street Journal termed “human ‘curators,’” the first (known) deviation from Facebook’s computer-generated ranking system.
For publishers this creates another roadblock between them and their users, another hurdle to jump over and more consequently an additional system to understand since the “curators” for Pages and the newsfeed algorithm, and the best time to Tweet, and the demographics for Pinterest are all different.
For users, those that choose to download the app this does create a new way to engage with Facebook and the app does have the traditional newsfeed. It creates a way to organize and sort your own “pages” similar to a newspaper. But all of that is a lot of work, and one has to wonder how many users will truly engage with the app fully to get even a substantial amount value out of Pages.