Facebook’s Changes to the News View

On Friday, Facebook made yet another change to how users see their news feed on their homepage when the log in. Previously, when you logged in you saw all the latest news and posts from your friends and from the fan pages you follow. Additionally, there was the “Highlights” section off to the right hand side of the screen which many people never really understood the usefulness of this feature nor was it ever really clear how a particular story, photo, video or link ended up in your Highlights section.

Now when you log in you will first see the “News Feed” on your Home page. According to Facebook’s Blog this is

“the most interesting things that happened in the last day in the “News Feed” view. News Feed picks stories that we think you’ll enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked and commented on it and how likely you are to interact with that story.”

What this means is that Facebook has “picked” some of your friends and fan page’s updates or postings that they think you will be most interested in regardless of when they were posted and is essentially *highlighting* them for you. This does have some benefits in that you might find a posting or update that is interesting to you from several hours to a couple of days ago that you might have missed when you were not logged into Facebook. However, it also means that Facebook is picking these for you so there may also been people or pages showing up in this stream that really are not a high priority for you.

The Live Feed is a feed of what’s happening currently…the most recent posts as they happen in real time. This is the same as the feed you had before with a few small exceptions. One is the return of information about when friends become friends of someone else, when they are tagged in a photo or video and when they become fans of a fan page. While I’m not entirely too keen on having this information back in my newstream, there are probably others out there who don’t mind it. I do think that the addition of know which friends became fans of which fan pages or members of a new group along with the ability to become a fan or join a group right from the newstream is actually going to be a big benefit to helping fan pages grow their fan page and increase their visibility- something many fan pages and groups struggle with. However, if you have friends who are highly active on Facebook and each and every action they take is in your news feed, then I think there is the risk that more people may be hiding their highly active friends as Facebook has failed to provide people with the option of opting out of seeing some types of items in your Live Feed.

It is also important to be aware that Facebook has initially set your Live Feed to have a maximum number of friends in your live feed to be 250. You can change this to higher number and Facebook informs you this means there will be a higher number of posts. You can also choose which friends or fan pages that you want to see more of and which ones you wish to hide altogether. To do this, find the “Edit Options” link at the bottom of your Live Feed/Home page.

As with most changes in Facebook, this one will take some time to get used to and there are many out there who will oppose the change initially starting different groups and pages with a stated mission of trying to “bring back” whichever feature they felt should not be removed. Ultimately though, these changes will be here to stay. Well, at least until the next change that is.

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