十年是一段很長的時間——即使是在現實世界。在互聯網領域，它更猶如一個世紀，尤其是以初創公司的壽命來衡量的話。而這就是Facebook實時新聞推送服務（News Feeds）上線的時長，如今，它已經成為了擁有超過15億用戶的服務的核心組成部分。

“我們現在甚至很難想象沒有這個基本功能的社交網絡。”本周二，在與首席執行官馬克·扎克伯格及其他三個新聞推送團隊的最早成員進行討論時，Facebook的早期員工“博茲”安德魯·博斯沃斯回憶說。（當然，這次活動通過Facebook的流媒體服務進行了直播。）

博茲表示，當時，網站“只是一個頁面，有根大手指，指示新文章的數量。”用戶需要點擊每個好友的主頁，試圖回憶他們的上篇博文是什么，有沒有更新內容。

扎克伯格回憶說：“很難回憶起那么久以前的事情了，不過當時你得到處瀏覽，看看好友的主頁，看看誰在他們的留言板上寫了東西，他們發了什么新文章。如果你在主頁上更新了內容，也沒法保證其他人會去看它。現在我們都覺得有人去看是理所應當的……但在當時，世界上沒有類似的產品。”

團隊最初的三個成員，包括克里斯·考克斯（如今負責新聞推送的產品開發）和魯奇·桑格威，一起努力了大約9個月。2006年9月5日深夜，新聞推送功能就此誕生。

接下來一切都一團糟。

博茲在直播時回憶道，他在產品發布前就去休假了。所以桑格威、考克斯和工程師Kang-Xing Jin只能用扎克伯格的電腦關注用戶對該功能的最初反應。當時，Facebook只有約1,000萬用戶，其中許多人似乎都認為新聞推送是Facebook推出的服務中最糟糕的。

扎克伯格在直播中說：“在公司內部，我們都很喜歡它，看起來它明顯是個不錯的功能，所以當我們推出這項服務時，我們希望讓人們感到興奮，我們期待著第一批反饋。但最后我們得到的并不是好消息。”

考克斯回憶道，開發團隊發現有超過100萬用戶都在呼吁：“我討厭新聞推送，請把它關掉。”

根據當時的頭條新聞所述，許多用戶討厭新聞推送，是因為它很徹底地改變了網站的運轉方式。另一個令人討厭的地方在于新聞推送會以一種更加明顯的方式反映用戶的行為——贊、分享和評論等。

許多用戶似乎把這看作對隱私權的侵犯，之后Facebook推出的幾乎每個新功能都會受到類似的控訴。桑格威指出，約有10%的用戶威脅要刪除賬號或抵制這項服務。

扎克伯格被迫為這次轉型的處理方式發表道歉聲明。他寫道：“冷靜下來，深呼吸。我們會聽取你的意見。”當時許多人認為這是標準的充耳不聞的做法。

Facebook共同創始人和初始團隊在直播中清楚大聲地表達了他們對于新聞推送的熱忱。桑格威表示，這一靈感來源于他們看到人們不斷點擊一個個好友的主頁，于是他們試著思考怎樣簡化用戶的操作。

不過很顯然，在當時，他們的想法和人們的看法有著巨大的差異。

這種差異可能在許多方面還延續到了如今。現在，每天使用新聞推送的用戶超過15億，因此，它能大大影響人們每天看到的全球各地的信息，無論是嬰兒照，還是關于爆炸的新聞，或是警察槍擊。

這種影響反過來幫助Facebook控制了（無論Facebook承認與否）大型媒體的命運，后者如今要依靠社交網絡向用戶推送內容。Facebook還可以在廣告上爭取利益，作為播放媒體內容的回報，或是讓媒體付費來進行直播。每次Facebook調整算法，這些媒體機構都會感到戰栗。

正如澤伊內普·圖菲克西和其他一些社會學家指出的那樣，新聞推送還從許多重要的方面塑造了人們看待世界的方式。它決定推送哪些內容，不推送哪些內容，都會帶來巨大的影響。

考克斯是在新聞推送功能上線前一年加入Facebook的。他回憶起當時與公司的共同創始人達斯汀·莫斯科維茨和早期員工亞當·德安吉洛的談話：新聞推送應該如何成為用戶在數字世界的“報紙”——這個比喻被他和扎克伯格繼續沿用了下去。

在人類的歷史上，報紙是最受歡迎的新聞來源，它也讓Facebook從一家小型初創公司轉變成了市值超過3,750億美元的跨國巨頭。

作為一個產品，新聞推送顯然獲得了巨大的成功。不過作為一項社會現象，它的全面影響才剛剛開始浮現。(財富中文網)

譯者：嚴匡正

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.