There's One Big Reason To Believe Facebook Can Survive Its News Feed Problem

Yesterday we posted a story about the problems with Facebook's News Feed.

In short: There's so much stuff being shared on Facebook that the News Feed is struggling to sort through it all. Mobile applications are successfully peeling off pieces of information that are flowing through the News Feed, which poses a long term threat to Facebook.

The post is based off a conversation we had with analyst Benedict Evans. We ended it with him cautioning that Facebook is at risk of turning into Yahoo: A big company we use everyday, but don't really think about.

There's one important point we left out of that post. Facebook's News Feed does have a lot of challenges, but there's a solid reason to believe it doesn't turn into Yahoo, and that reason is called Mark Zuckerberg.

By all appearances, Zuckerberg remains highly dedicated to Facebook. He doesn't have his head in the sand about the challenges that come with the exponential growth in sharing.

Mike McIsaac at AllThingsD has a great report on Zuckerberg and Facebook's product chief Chris Cox thinking about to tweak Facebook's design to accommodate all the sharing happening on Facebook.

The key takeaway, if you're worried about Facebook's future, is that Zuckerberg is all over it, and is aware that he needs to tweak his product.

On the mobile front, Zuckerberg wisely purchased Instagram, and was trying to buy Snapchat before it became a massive success. He also acquired Beluga, a mobile messaging app, in 2011, and turned that into Facebook Messenger.

In other words, he saw the threats coming to Facebook before most people.

And this is why Facebook won't be Yahoo. At Yahoo, the company never had the same sort of strong, product focused leadership that Zuckerberg provides.