
The News Feed, invented by Facebook in 2006, has played an important role in what social media has evolved into today.
It allowed users to talk to all their connections at once, and monitor what was going on in their circles.
Previously, Facebook users could go onto each other's profiles and look up what basic information they had publically available. There was no way to see their activity on the platform.
However, when it was first launched, 10 years ago, users detested the new form and demanded it be changed back.
"About one million people joined a protest group threatening to quit if we didn't change Facebook back," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reflecting on the journey in a post on his page.
"I remember there were actual protesters in the streets outside our office demanding we change."
The company did not change it back and ignored angry users.
Zuckerberg claims the News Feed was such a fundamental idea that, 10 years later, "every major social app has its own equivalent of News Feed".
This is true for Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn, among others.
What you see
The company now draws nearly every two in seven people to its site every day. Users sometimes have hundreds or thousands of friends each. Not every post within a user's circle can be shown to them.
To combat this problem, Facebook employs algorithms to help weight which posts are more important to the user and these are routinely updated. The updates are also done to try and encourage more time spent on the site.
This year alone, it has decided to take a stance on 'click-baity' headlines and is showing fewer stories with those types of attention-grabbers, while prioritising stories users spend longer hovering over.
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