Facebook is working on a top-secret project, led by VP of products Chris Cox, who helped create the site’s saving grace- the “News Feed.”

Cox has been on the back-end of production for over a year now, overseeing the product managers team, the user-experience team, and the design team as VP of Product.

Mark Zuckerberg has enlisted Cox to take the lead on a project called called “Info D” – short for “information distribution.”

The mission behind Info D is to turn the Facebook News Feed into “a kind of Information Distribution hub for the entire Internet.”

There are two big differences between what the News Feed is doing now, and how Info D will change it.

Difference Number One: News Feed will know more about you.

Right now, the items that show up in your News Feed go their because they have a lot of comments or likes, were posted by someone you care about, and are relatively new. This algorithm is called Edge Rank.

Cox is working on building a News Feed that will know a lot more about the user looking at it, and will use this information to determine what it shows.

Our source says the goal is for the News Feed to be “running a query” all the time: “What should [the user] care about” based on that user’s friends, purchase history, Web history, location, and much more.

Another way to look at it: Smartphones, tablets, wearable computers, and smart TVs are able to collect a lot of data about their users. Cox is working on aggregating all of that to build a smarter News Feed.

Difference Number Two: News Feed will pull content from more sources, more directly

As of now, the majority of the content on the Feed Right now, are Facebook Pages created by content sites, celebrities, or brands.

Cox and his team are trying to clear the News Feed of pages of this nature.

What he wants to do is make publishers design their sites so that all of Facebook’s social and sharing functions are already built in.

Our source says Cox’s message to publishers will be: “As long as you format your page correctly, we’ll show it to the people who will click on it.”

Closing The Loop

The next mission is to have less videos in the News Feed. They want users to leave the site entirely to watch videos.

The long term goal is to have Facebook help other sites make money from ads for videos by having more people visit the site rather than just having their videos played on Facebook.

Two interesting tactics to help out the sites that make them money. Looks like if you scratch Facebook’s back they will scratch yours long and hard.

Sean Levinson | Elite.