Facebook starts to take more notice of your preferences to personalize your newsfeed

Facebook's constant tinkering with newsfeed algorithms has a tendency to leave people asking what on earth is wrong with a simple chronological display of posts. But the social network -- driven by ads -- feels that it knows better and likes to play with the code that determines what you see.

Having made changes to ensure that you see more posts from the people you know (well, Facebook is supposed to be about friends and family...) the latest change sees the social network aiming to bring you posts that are "more personally informative".

Facebook uses its Feed Quality Program to determine the type of content people want to see, and to draw up a list of 'signals' that are used to personalize newsfeeds. Today yet another signal is being added into the mix in a bid to make story ranking more accurate and relevant. Facebook explains how the news system works in what amounts to an exercise in stating the bleeding obvious:

...we look at the stories that people tell us they find informative. People from our Feed Quality Program look at each story in their feed and rank it on a scale of one to five -- one being "really not informative" and five being "really informative". Generally, we’ve found people find stories informative if they are related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions and if they contain news about the world around them. That could be anything from recipes, to local issues, to global current events. The stories people rate as informative and really informative help create a new prediction about how informative we think you’ll find each story.

We then combine this signal with how relevant the story might be to you personally -- taking into account things like your relationship with the person or publisher that posted, or what you choose to click on, comment on or share -- to best predict stories that you might personally find informative. Informative stories are therefore different for each person and will likely change over time.

The change is rolling out starting now, so you should (in theory) notice an 'improvement' in newsfeed relevance in the coming days.

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