这项最让人痛恨的功能成就了今天的Facebook

十年是一段很长的时间——即使是在现实世界。在互联网领域，它更犹如一个世纪，尤其是以初创公司的寿命来衡量的话。而这就是Facebook实时新闻推送服务（News Feeds）上线的时长，如今，它已经成为了拥有超过15亿用户的服务的核心组成部分。

“我们现在甚至很难想象没有这个基本功能的社交网络。”本周二，在与首席执行官马克·扎克伯格及其他三个新闻推送团队的最早成员进行讨论时，Facebook的早期员工“博兹”安德鲁·博斯沃斯回忆说。（当然，这次活动通过Facebook的流媒体服务进行了直播。）

博兹表示，当时，网站“只是一个页面，有根大手指，指示新文章的数量。”用户需要点击每个好友的主页，试图回忆他们的上篇博文是什么，有没有更新内容。

扎克伯格回忆说：“很难回忆起那么久以前的事情了，不过当时你得到处浏览，看看好友的主页，看看谁在他们的留言板上写了东西，他们发了什么新文章。如果你在主页上更新了内容，也没法保证其他人会去看它。现在我们都觉得有人去看是理所应当的……但在当时，世界上没有类似的产品。”

团队最初的三个成员，包括克里斯·考克斯（如今负责新闻推送的产品开发）和鲁奇·桑格威，一起努力了大约9个月。2006年9月5日深夜，新闻推送功能就此诞生。

接下来一切都一团糟。

博兹在直播时回忆道，他在产品发布前就去休假了。所以桑格威、考克斯和工程师Kang-Xing Jin只能用扎克伯格的电脑关注用户对该功能的最初反应。当时，Facebook只有约1,000万用户，其中许多人似乎都认为新闻推送是Facebook推出的服务中最糟糕的。

扎克伯格在直播中说：“在公司内部，我们都很喜欢它，看起来它明显是个不错的功能，所以当我们推出这项服务时，我们希望让人们感到兴奋，我们期待着第一批反馈。但最后我们得到的并不是好消息。”

考克斯回忆道，开发团队发现有超过100万用户都在呼吁：“我讨厌新闻推送，请把它关掉。”

根据当时的头条新闻所述，许多用户讨厌新闻推送，是因为它很彻底地改变了网站的运转方式。另一个令人讨厌的地方在于新闻推送会以一种更加明显的方式反映用户的行为——赞、分享和评论等。

许多用户似乎把这看作对隐私权的侵犯，之后Facebook推出的几乎每个新功能都会受到类似的控诉。桑格威指出，约有10%的用户威胁要删除账号或抵制这项服务。

扎克伯格被迫为这次转型的处理方式发表道歉声明。他写道：“冷静下来，深呼吸。我们会听取你的意见。”当时许多人认为这是标准的充耳不闻的做法。

Facebook共同创始人和初始团队在直播中清楚大声地表达了他们对于新闻推送的热忱。桑格威表示，这一灵感来源于他们看到人们不断点击一个个好友的主页，于是他们试着思考怎样简化用户的操作。

不过很显然，在当时，他们的想法和人们的看法有着巨大的差异。

这种差异可能在许多方面还延续到了如今。现在，每天使用新闻推送的用户超过15亿，因此，它能大大影响人们每天看到的全球各地的信息，无论是婴儿照，还是关于爆炸的新闻，或是警察枪击。

这种影响反过来帮助Facebook控制了（无论Facebook承认与否）大型媒体的命运，后者如今要依靠社交网络向用户推送内容。Facebook还可以在广告上争取利益，作为播放媒体内容的回报，或是让媒体付费来进行直播。每次Facebook调整算法，这些媒体机构都会感到战栗。

正如泽伊内普·图菲克西和其他一些社会学家指出的那样，新闻推送还从许多重要的方面塑造了人们看待世界的方式。它决定推送哪些内容，不推送哪些内容，都会带来巨大的影响。

考克斯是在新闻推送功能上线前一年加入Facebook的。他回忆起当时与公司的共同创始人达斯汀·莫斯科维茨和早期员工亚当·德安吉洛的谈话：新闻推送应该如何成为用户在数字世界的“报纸”——这个比喻被他和扎克伯格继续沿用了下去。

在人类的历史上，报纸是最受欢迎的新闻来源，它也让Facebook从一家小型初创公司转变成了市值超过3,750亿美元的跨国巨头。

作为一个产品，新闻推送显然获得了巨大的成功。不过作为一项社会现象，它的全面影响才刚刚开始浮现。(财富中文网)

译者：严匡正

A decade is a long time—even in the real world. On the Internet, it is more like a century, especially in the life of a startup. But that’s how long it has been since Facebook launched the real-time news feed that has become the core of the service for more than 1.5 billion people.

It’s hard to even imagine the social network now without this essential feature, as early Facebook staffer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth recalled during a discussion with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and three other members of the original news feed team on Tuesday (hosted via Facebook’s live-streaming video service, of course).

At that time, the site “was just a page with a big finger pointing at the number of new posts you had,” Boz said. Users had to click on the profiles of each of the people they were friends with, and then try to remember what their last post was and if anything had changed.

“It’s hard to remember back that far, but you had to just browse around and check people’s profiles, to see who wrote on someone’s wall or what they had posted,” Zuckerberg recalled. “There was no guarantee if you put something on your profile that someone was even going to see it. Now we kind of take it for granted…But at the time, there was really nothing like it in the world.”

After about nine months of work by the three members of the original team, which included Chris Cox—now in charge of product development for the news feed—and Ruchi Sanghvi, the new feature was rolled out late at night on September 5th, 2006.

And then all hell broke loose.

Boz left on vacation just before the launch, he recalled during the Live broadcast. So Sanghvi, Cox, and engineer Kang-Xing Jin had to watch the initial reaction while gathered around Zuckerberg’s PC. At that time, Facebook FB 2.55% only had about 10 million users, and a huge number of them seemed to think the news feed was the worst thing that had ever happened to the service.

“We all loved it internally, and it seemed pretty clear it would be a good thing, so when we launched it we expected people to be really excited, and we were waiting for the first feedback to come in,” Zuckerberg said during the Live broadcast. “But it was not good news.”

Cox recalled the team woke up to a new group with more than a million members called, “I Hate the News Feed, Turn It Off.”

As the headlines from that time reflect, many people hated the news feed because it changed the way the site worked in a fairly radical way. They also disliked it because it revealed their behavior—likes, shares, and comments, etc.—in a more obvious way.

Many users seemed to see this is an invasion of privacy, something that has become a running theme with almost every new feature that Facebook rolls out. Sanghvi cited approximately 10% of the existing user base threatened to delete their accounts or boycott the service.

Zuckerberg was forced to write an apology for the way the transition was handled. “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,” he wrote, in what many said at the time was a classically tone-deaf manner.

The enthusiasm that the Facebook co-founder and the original team had for the idea of the news feed comes across loud and clear in the Live stream. Sanghvi said that the idea came from watching people clicking around from profile to profile, and trying to think of ways to make that easier for users.

But it was clear at the time that there was a huge disconnect between that desire and how it was perceived.

That disconnect arguably continues today in a variety of ways. The news feed is now used by more than 1.5 billion people every day, and as such, it has a huge influence on the information that people see about the world, whether it’s baby photos or news about a bombing or a police shooting.

That influence in turn helps control (whether Facebook wants to admit it or not) the fate of large media entities, who now rely on the social network to send users to their content, or to cut advertising deals with them in return for hosting their content, or to pay them to create Live video. And every time Facebook tweaks its algorithm, those media outlets tremble.

The feed also shapes the way that people see the world in some fairly significant ways, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and others have pointed out. What it chooses to include and exclude can have a huge impact.

Cox, who joined Facebook a year before the news feed was rolled out, recalled talking with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early staffer Adam D’Angelo about how the news feed should be a “newspaper” for the digital world around its users—a metaphor he and Zuckerberg have continued to use.

That newspaper has become the most popular news source in the history of humanity, and it has also powered the transformation of Facebook from a tiny startup into a globe-spanning behemoth with a market value of more than $375 billion.

As a product, it is clearly a massive success. But as a social phenomenon, its full implications are only just starting to become obvious.