Making better use of the news feed

As a software developer myself, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing IT companies, especially the large ones with user numbers in the thousands or even millions, is effectively communicating product changes to these users. Many companies fail dismally at this, resulting in much of their user base remaining quite simply unaware that these changes have been made unless they stumble across them accidentally. Putting news in a support forum or on a webpage is ineffective as the majority of users don't visit these sites and won't see these posts, and emails are fraught with problems of delivery failures and spam filtering with no guarantee of receipt. What is needed is a way to communicate information on software changes directly to the user through a medium they are already using to receive other types of news, and it suddenly occurred to me that Facebook already have the perfect platform for achieving this, yet are not exploiting the full power of it.

As a company, Facebook are notorious for making frequent and sometimes major alterations to the way their software works without properly informing users, who become confused and angered by so many unexpected changes to the user experience. However, one of their core products is the news feed, which has been developed and refined over many years to become an effective means of delivering personalised content to a large number of users, yet has inexplicably not been utilised as a communication tool by Facebook themselves. Alongside activity from the user's friends, pages and groups, why does the news feed not also contain announcements from Facebook detailing new and forthcoming changes to their products?

Putting such information in the news feed would provide a much better chance of users reading it as part of their social media routine, and ensures it is delivered directly to the user without relying on them actively searching for it. This then avoids the surprise and anger often expressed by users on suddenly discovering a familiar feature has changed without warning, and makes it clear when new features are introduced so they are more likely to be used - all too often improvements are deemed to have failed due to insufficient use, yet many potential users are ignorant of their very existence as they have not been effectively communicated. The relevance algorithm used for sorting stories could even be modified to ensure that news from Facebook themselves is always placed at the top of the feed where it is most likely to be seen.

As if to reinforce my argument, Facebook recently suffered a rare brief outage that rendered the entire system unavailable for a short period, but no explanation or apology was offered. Such occasional unscheduled downtime is unavoidable, but once normal service was resumed a short message could have been put in the news feed confirming the problem had been fixed and apologising for any inconvenience, a simple gesture but one that shows care and respect for users. Instead, with no official communication other than a non-specific 'there is a problem and we're working on it' type message, users were simply left to speculate on what went wrong, which is never good for a service provider's reputation.  

I believe this idea is brilliant in its simplicity as it makes use of an existing, mature and well-optimised technology with only minor modifications required. The more I think about it, the more I fail to understand why it hasn't been done as it seems so obvious a solution to this serious problem. So many changes are made without any information about them being made available at all, and on the rare occasions when announcements are made they are usually tucked away deep within the help pages where they go virtually unnoticed. It's almost as if Facebook don't want their users to know about new or changed features, which is a very peculiar mentality that surely defeats the point of them being introduced in the first place, and shows a lack of respect for the users, without whom the company would cease to exist.