How would you use ML to improve Facebook the newsfeed?

> Goals clarification- we want to improve fb news feed for all the users by focusing on increasing user engagement.

> User personas- frequent user, in-frequent user, casual user, business user. Let’s focus on in-frequent user since they are least engaged.

> As an in-frequent user, I want to get most important updates regarding friends, groups, businesses and topics that I follow so that I get latest about each of the categories.

> Here are some of the prioritized use cases for in-frequent user:

1.     Get most important updates about a friend, group or biz.

2.     Suggest to message a friend with whom you have a lot of history.

3.     Suggest to send a birthday greeting to a friend or public or private setting.

4.     Provide a summarized updates or announcements about a group or biz.

> LOE estimation:

Solutions: For use case 1: Get most important updates about a friend, group or biz. Implement an algorithm to search & prioritize these updates w.r.t life events, motivating updates, challenges, inspirational messages for last 6- 9 months on top of regular updates. Challenges: It might be confusing to a user initially so we have to educate them that these are important updates for this duration. The separation between important & regular news feed needs to be well defined.

For use case 2: Suggesting to connect to a friend with whom you have or had a history. If you are watching a video or reading an update about a friend, utilize ML to find to calculate relevant history about the person and suggest to send him a message or connect. Challenges: learning algorithm needs to be well-defined so it doesn’t show up a lot of suggestions which in-turn overwhelm the user.

For use case 3: We already have a birthday feature, this is kind of add on to be able to send wishes in a public or private setting. We can put an icon on top of name to highlight a person’s birthday.

> Summary: In order to improve fb news further by focusing on increasing user engagement for infrequent users. We can build 3 new features for the news feed to feature most important updates about a friend, group or business. Suggesting to connect with a friend with whom you had a history, enhance birthday feature further by sending a public or private message.

> Some of the success metrics will be:

1.     MOU increase for a user WoW or MoM

2.     DUA, WAU, MAU for a user

3.     Average time spent on the newsfeed before and after

4.     Churn rate (fb account deletion or inactivity for > 30 days)

5.     No. of likes, comments, reactions, shares

6.     Increase in usage of birthday feature by user