Facebook has a PageRank of its own for its News Feed

You've probably gathered by now that the Facebook f8 conference is under away. Juicy details of Facebook's underpinnings are coming thick and fast -- and we're going to try and cover all of them -- but first: EdgeRank, the algorithm that generates your News Feed. In much the same way as Google returns relevant results, EdgeRank uses what it knows about you to produce hopefully-relevant news.

An Edge is one point, one update, one upload, on your social graph. Every time one of your friends does something, that creates an Edge. Some updates are weighted heavier: an uploaded photo is presumably the most important, while Likes are probably the lowest. The Edge also has more chance of appearing in your News Feed if it originates from a friend you interact with. God only knows how Facebook measures such interactions -- is a private message 'better' than replying to a status update? -- and I'm sure it'll be a long time (if ever) before we know how exactly EdgeRank works.

As a corollary, Tech Crunch talks about the concept of 'News Feed Optimization' (NFO), though there are scant few examples of it in practice. Like Search Engine Optimization, NFO tries to game the system: there's a lot of free advertising if a Facebook app can make it to the News Feed!

Tags: algorithm, conference, developer, edgerank, f8, facebook, news feed, NewsFeed, pagerank, ranking