A decade has passed since Facebook launched News Feed.
Today, we see it as one of the social network's most defining features. The Facebook experience just isn't complete without it. However, that wasn't always the case.
Prior to News Feed, all users saw when they logged in is their own profile display pictures, the personal information panel, messages and a bunch of settings.
"We literally showed you nothing of any value," commented Andrew Bosworth, the vice president of Facebook's ads and business platform who was part of the team that worked on the feature. "The homepage was like a giant finger with how many pokes you had ... a giant envelope with the number of messages you had. You would literally go from profile to profile and you'd try to remember what had changed since you were last there."
Bosworth noted that it was the problem they had to solve. The idea was to build a newspaper that pulled together the best bits of what changed within each user's social network.
"We wanted to make a personal newspaper for everyone," explained Ruchi Sanghvi, a Facebook engineer that was also part of the News Feed team. "We wanted to deliver 10 million personalized newspapers every single day."
On September 2006, the team released the first live version of News Feed. However, the users' responses were not what the team expected.
"Internally we loved it ... We launched it and we were expecting people to be excited ... We sat around waiting for the first feedback to come in," recalled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his experience when News Feed was first launched. "It was not good news."
Many of Facebook's 10-million user base then were enraged with the new feature. Most took issue with how the new feature intruded into their privacy.
"A couple might feel comfortable having an intimate conversation at a crowded restaurant, for example, on the assumption that even though strangers could potentially tune in, none would care to. The new Facebook feature, though, was the equivalent of broadcasting that conversation over the public address system," wrote Warren St. John for the New York Times in a 2006 article following the News Feed launch.
"I've heard complaints before about sites (eg. Stardoll) that display the latest visitors to your profile page - in many ways, Facebook's new tools are more invasive," wrote Mashable's Pete Cashmore.
Users also formed several groups, with some having more than a million members, and petitioned against News Feed.
"We woke up to these groups with hundreds of thousands of people talking about how they hated News Feed," Sanghvi said about what happened the morning after the News Feed launch. "There were newspaper reporters and students camped outside the office. We had to sneak out of the back door if we ever needed to leave."
Another Facebook News Feed team member, Chris Cox, described it as the "most inglorious launch moment in history."
To quell the fiery hearts of its users, the team worked for another two days and released privacy options that allow users to opt out of the new feature or filter what activities get fed to the social network.
"Amidst all the chaos, all the outrage, we noticed something unusual," wrote Sanghvi in her Facebook post dedicated to News Feed's 10th anniversary. "Even though everyone claimed they hated it, engagement had doubled."
Off the back of News Feed, as well as its other interactive features, Facebook has amassed almost 1.6 billion active monthly users as of Q2 2016. Below is a video of the News Feed team's stroll down memory lane.
