3

I am developing an activity feed for a basic social app: you can follow people and people can follow you back. When you follow someone, content from that person will appear on the activity feed. I am debating wether the feed should show content posted by that person before I followed her, or if it should show content made only after I started following her.

I see that Twitter implements the first option, and Instagram the latter.

I can’t really understand the pros and cons of each. What are some good practices about this?

Improve this question
2
  • Please, could you give a lot more context?
    – Steve Dodier-Lazaro
    Jan 6 '16 at 17:17
  • @SteveDL I don't know what more context I can give without revealing what the app actually does, and i'm not allowed to do that until it's released.
    – Hugo Alves
    Jan 6 '16 at 17:49
1

It depends. If the app is about people that know each other (FB kind), then its a good idea to just limit the feed from the 'day they started following'. If its mostly strangers (Twitter kind), then you can have full feed visibility. Reason I say is, Person A could have said or written something about person B in the past and A might not like the idea of B knowing about A's past comments. It could be an idea or a controversial topic , not just what A said about B.. things like that. Like I said it depends what the relationship model is between users and what the 'following' model is - do users have control on who can follow them ?

EDIT:

I think sharing ALL feed sounds right. You need to have a very strong reason to shut down past feed .. Just my two cents.

Improve this answer
6
  • At the momento the user has no control over who can follow them.
    – Hugo Alves
    Jan 6 '16 at 16:33
  • How about privacy concerns ? what type of feed are we talking about here ? I edited my answer.
    – PK2016
    Jan 6 '16 at 16:37
  • the content shared by users is not actually sensitive, for example (not this case) cooking recipes. In the long run it's planned to allow a user to set his profile as private preventing other from following
    – Hugo Alves
    Jan 6 '16 at 16:55
  • 1
    Your contract can be terminated because of a tweet that you had two years ago. Barcelona B ex-player had this pain recently...
    – Abektes
    Jan 7 '16 at 9:34
  • 1
    @Abektes true but i don't see that happening with the type of content users can share. But i'll give it some more thought. Tks for the warning.
    – Hugo Alves
    Jan 7 '16 at 9:40

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.