Well, it's been two weeks since Facebook launched their new "Live Feed" feature.
Their explanation of this new feature is to allow top news stories to stay in the "News Feed" based on some criteria of interest that Facebook establishes based on your interaction with the site, while fresh stories scroll by on the "Live Feed".
This seems like a plausible explanation, but it leaves me with some doubts.
For one thing, Facebook will revert to showing the News Feed by default eventually, no matter how many times you click on Live Feed.
I suggest there may be an alternate explanation to the new feature, as well as some other changes the site has seen. Scaling problems.
This is only conjecture based on some observations I have made in the past two weeks, but here are some of the observations:
- Facebook reverts to News Feed, which would be much easier to cache and give better performance than the Live Feed.
- The feed no longer auto-updates to show new posts using AJAX like it used to.
- The page shows fewer stories and does not auto-fill when you scroll down as often.
