Facebook’s original name for its 2006 stream of updates was News Feed. The feature brought friends’ posts, photographs, status updates, and other activity into one continuously changing page.
Before News Feed, Facebook users generally visited individual profile pages to see what friends had posted. Its launch made the service more useful as a daily destination, but it also caused controversy because users were suddenly shown an organized summary of activity without changing their privacy settings.
Facebook later added ranking systems to decide which stories appeared first. The name News Feed remained familiar even as the feature expanded beyond conventional news. In 2022, Facebook began referring to the main area as Feed in some of its product language, but News Feed is the historic and widely recognized name for the original feature.
The feature should not be confused with the Wall, an older profile-based posting area, or Timeline, the later profile layout that organized a person’s history chronologically.