Facebook feed changes and you
Confused about the difference between news feed and live feed on Facebook? Me too. The whole new new Facebook annoyed and confused me. I finally googled it to see wtf was going on. What I learned was interesting.
The biggest change on Facebook felt like the whole live and news feed thing. That was the most obvious one. We all quickly figured out how to drag our status feed to the top of the links menu on the left. That was supposed to restore the old Facebook, but it didn’t since all the feeds are now split into status, links, pages, etc., plus the new Live Feed and News Feed. So, here’s the difference between all the feeds, which is obvious if you think about it:
Live Feed: A feed of everything in Facebook. In addition to status updates, this includes friends’ quiz results, Mob Wars and Farmville announcements, page announcements, every. little. thing. Live Feed is twitterish. Unfortunately, the live part of the Live Feed doesn’t work well. It’s slow and it doesn’t always refresh, so no one noticed for a while.
News Feed: This is a feed of supposedly interesting stuff. It weeds out the stupid things like Mob Wars and Farmville. It also weeds out everything else. News Feed is a merge with the Highlights section that was placed on the right-hand column in the last change. Apparently users asked for this to happen. You can, however, hide the irritating Farmville announcements with the hide button.
One problem: News Feed uses a super sekret algorithm known only to Facebook to determine what goes into the feed based on what they think is most relevant to you. The popularity filters look for “interactivity,” or what you comment, like, or share, basic “user activity stories” (i.e., friend acceptance, event RSVPs, fanning),
HA! I have to laugh at the statement, “They blame us for the change: Facebook claims that these changes were prompted by user feedback and the point is to reduce information overload.” What has happened is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE! Now we have TOO MUCH INFORMATION and most of it is the kind that most users DON’T WANT TO SEE and that is “Friend added friend” and “friend plays game and how many things he has” is the most USELESS things to see on FB now! If they (Facebook) did this to REDUCE information overlaod, THEY BLEW BIG TIME AND 99% of users I have talked too HATE IT HUST AS MUCH. See the Facebook group “Change Facebook Back To Normal!!” It has over 1.76 MILLION on there AND NOT ONE OF THEM LIKE THE NEW SYSTEM WHATSOEVER. Also digging a bit deeper and reading Facebooks own Privacy Policy we can see that Facebook is COMPLETELY VIOLATING it’s own privacy policy, Where
in your privacy settings does it say every single friend will be
notified on what friends you added in their news feed? It doesn’t! In
fact, the added friend setting (in privacy settings) says it applies to
YOUR wall as Recent Activity. This Facebook change violated their
privacy setting/rule. Not nice Facebook!
Yep!