Mark Cuban and George Takei, take heart! The Dallas Mavericks owner and former Star Trek star have been kicking up a fuss of late about the way the social media site filters posts from Facebook (META) Pages, suggesting that Facebook prevents their posts from showing up in users’ New Feeds as a means to selling promoted posts.
Facebook maintained that it was simply protecting users’ feeds from being dominated by Page owners. Mr. Cuban told ReadWriteWeb that the Dallas Mavericks, the NBA franchise that he owns, would be de-emphasizing Facebook in its social media efforts.
Well, now Wired’s Ryan Tate reports that Facebook may have hit on a means of defusing the situation. To wit, the company is debuting a feature called “Pages Feed,” which gather posts exclusively from the Pages a user follows:
Facebook has been testing the special News Feed view over the last few weeks and plans to start rolling it out to all users later today. “It’s a ‘Pages only’ view of your news feed, making it even easier for people to keep up with the Pages they care about most,” a spokesperson writes. “You can access the new feed view from your home page by clicking ‘Pages feed’ on the left hand side of the page.” The feed will select the most relevant pages posts for you algorithmically, meaning that you aren’t guaranteed to see all posts from all the pages you follow. But you’ll see more pages content than you would in the aggressively filtered regular News Feed.
Per Mr. Tate, Facebook says the new feature isn’t a response to Mr. Cuban. Meanwhile, a quick check reveals Pages Feed up and running on our Facebook page, although perhaps not filtered as aggressively as we’d like: