I think they're working on the assumption that everyone likes the same kinds of news items as their Facebook friends. I don't think that's really true.
I think this will change the atmosphere of the site. Currently the news items are mostly about things going on in friends' lives. So when you "like" an item or comment on it, you're expressing an interest in that person. If Facebook gets cluttered up with news articles and videos, the metrics available to Facebook will also become cluttered. I'm afraid Facebook will start showing me technology stories submitted by classmates and stop showing me what's happening in my siblings' lives.
In my opinion, that's essentially a ranking problem, not a conceptual block. There's no doubt a wide-open field of "how to get recommendations right" once things have moved over in that direction. One of the key ways of doing that will be figuring out how to weigh different sorts of interactions -- it won't just be so-and-so-likes-this, but also taking into account profile views, messages sent and so on.
I really don't like it. I don't want to see which of my friends' status updates are "hot". That's not how we use the site. Maybe my friends are attending some event, and I miss it because nobody commented on the status or "liked" it.
Social filtering is great for interacting with strangers on the internet. Strangers are weird and noisy. However I don't want to filter my real friends.
Yes exactly. I don't want to see what's merely been "liked" a lot - my newsfeed is going to be dominated by witty quotes and pictures of cats. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not actually important to me. Already people are saying they're missing stuff in the News Feed that they wish they'd seen, and having to trawl through the Live Feed parsing it manually.
In the old days, FB had sliders to say what you were more or less interested in (e.g. I had more photos and events, less relationship news) and people you were more or less interested in (more close RL friends who I didn't have a lot of FB overlap with, less work colleagues). Bringing that back could make this work...
I think this will change the atmosphere of the site. Currently the news items are mostly about things going on in friends' lives. So when you "like" an item or comment on it, you're expressing an interest in that person. If Facebook gets cluttered up with news articles and videos, the metrics available to Facebook will also become cluttered. I'm afraid Facebook will start showing me technology stories submitted by classmates and stop showing me what's happening in my siblings' lives.