But if you think about the fact that each of us have our own wall, that what shows up on my wall is ultimately a combination of 1) who I am (my interaction with apps, my profile, my location, etc), 2) who I’m associated with (my social graph), and 3) what everyone else did (some stories are just really popular).

In the case of search, what exactly do we get? Based on the query, the search engine decides that a subset of all webpages are potentially relevant (what I call candidate generation). And then, using a combination of query-dependent (eg how many times the words appear on the page), query-independent (eg freshness) and collective-behavioral (eg how often do users click on this result) factors, it orders the candidates by a magical relevance rank.

Compared to the wall (and discovery in general), it’s actually less different than you might think. Given who the user is (the “query”), the system determines a set of “stories” it can show based on his social graph and his past interactions (candidate generation). Then it attempts to order them in some fashion that will hopefully pop to the top things that you would find interesting, based on user-dependent (eg how many of your friends were involved), user-independent (freshness is good too) and collective (CTR’s good here as well) factors.

Now granted, search tend to have a clearer sense of intent and relevance (except when you look down the top searches and find things like ‘sex’ and ‘jokes’). But really the most significant difference I see is the sense of novelty, which is much more important in discovery than in search.

As for FWO? I think if we think along these same lines, there are some really interesting things that could be done to optimize the chance that stories from your app reaches the right people. Maybe another post.

It’s the Feed, Stupid!

Facebook want applications to compete for this prime real estate, the same way that websites vie for web users’ attention by striving for the top ranking in google. If FB gets what it wants, the wall will be the new battleground for the attention and eyeballs of online consumers.

FWO is the new SEO. Facebook Wall Optimization anyone?