At age 26 years, Greg Marra is one of the most influential people in the world, according to the New York Times.
What is he doing; Pilot the algorithm chosen by the articles published on facebook and decide on their luck.
It all started when in 2012 Greg Marra uploaded to Twitter a fake profile automaton, @Trackgirl, who was the perfect friend for people who love jogging. This woman interacted with her friends on the Internet, posting and commenting on events related to jogging. He quickly gained followers but all of them were unaware that he was actually a robot.
This experience made Greg Marra famous through an article in the Wired magazine, which is very valid in the US for technology issues. Immediately, this young boy, working on Google, has passion with the robots and says he likes to create things that come alive on their own, was recruited by Mark Zuckerberg on facebook.
Decides on the articles we read
A month later this Olin graduate College, of a prestigious engineering school near his hometown of Boston, became Facebook's head of newsfeed products. His job; To work on the algorithm that decides which articles will be high in news.
If each of us has access to thousands of posts on facebook every day, facebook itself suggests about 300, which are sorted in some order. At the age of 26, Greg Marra has the ability to change what the approximately 1,3 billion Facebook members see on their page. That makes him one of the most influential people, according to the New York Times.
It has a tremendous influence especially in America, where the 20% of the news site traffic comes from facebook, according to a survey by SimpleReach. Currently, 30% of American adults use facebook to update on topical issues.
So facebook became one of the main news gates
American media is therefore increasingly dependent on Greg Marra's algorithm, both for traffic and revenue. "15 years ago Google changed journalism by introducing the refercement technique. Today, it is the parameters of facebook that are changing journalism again. What we're seeing is that Facebook has allowed us to gain tremendous traffic and reach readers that we wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise," says Justin Green, social media specialist for the Washington Examiner newspaper.
