what is facebook edgerank?

[Mudassar Naveed]

EdgeRank is the Facebook algorithm that decides which stories appear in each user's newsfeed. The algorithm hides boring stories, so if your story doesn't score well, no one will see it.

The first thing someone sees when they log into Facebook is the newsfeed. This is a summary of what's been happening recently among their friends on Facebook.

Every action their friends take is a potential newsfeed story. Facebook calls these actions "Edges." That means whenever a friend posts a status update, comments on another status update, tags a photo, joins a fan page, or RSVP's to an event it generates an "Edge," and a story about that Edge might show up in the user's personal newsfeed.

It'd be completely overwhelming if the newsfeed showed all of the possible stories from your friends. So Facebook created an algorithm to predict how interesting each story will be to each user. Facebook calls this algorithm "EdgeRank" because it ranks the edges. Then they filter each user's newsfeed to only show the top-ranked stories for that particular user.