Living with Facebook’s Updated Feeds

Category: In The News

Do you like this?

Over the weekend, about 300 million people were surprised to find that Facebook had changed the default home page, without any warning. There are completely different options for what shows up on your news feed now – you can view a “Live Feed”, which is a continuously-updated stream of *everything* your friends do, or a “News Feed”, which is comprised of posts by your friends that have been liked or commented upon more than all other posts. Your home page is set to default to the News Feed unless you change it. But – there are other options!!

Users seem to be having a difficult time with this because they had just gotten comfortable with the last homepage update. It sounds like Facebook’s reasoning behind this latest change has to do with engaging the full spectrum of users, from casual to constant. This makes sense – the News Feed will be helpful for catching back up on “big news” that you might have missed over the course of a day or a week, and the Live Feed is being constantly updated so there’s almost always new content.

But, what about us in the middle???

Luckily, word has been spreading fast as to how to customize your feed to your own tastes. One solution that I’ve found helpful is this:

Go to the top left of your home page, where your lists live, and click ‘More’. Find ‘Status Updates’ in the list and drag it to the top. When you click on it, this becomes your default home page feed. (the same goes for any list you drag to the top and click on!)

Here’s a nice little comparison of the Live Feed vs. News Feed vs. Status Updates:

View	What You See	Benefits	Drawbacks
News Stream	Select posts from friends – status updates, links, pics – that have been liked and/or commented on	If you only check Facebook once a day, this will keep you informed on the most interesting or popular things your friends have been up to. Less noise.	If you check Facebook more than once a day, this feed gets stale quickly. Much less information than normal. Also, the posts are not in chronological order, which most users expect to see.
Live Feed	Every single little thing that your friends do – likes, new friends, comments. Everything.	This feed is updated real-time and can lead to re-engagement with people, groups, apps, etc that you hadn’t seen in a while.	It’s overwhelming. You can’t choose to hide certain types of activity anymore. Also, Facebook has limited the feed to 250 of your friends, by default. (*see instructions for customization below)
Status Updates	Only your friends’ status updates and any commments on them.	This is also updated real-time, and it’s a clean, clutter-free way to keep up with all of your friends (except those that you had chosen to hide before). It’s a happy medium of information.	You don’t get any posts except status updates, like when friends post new photo albums or use an application that you might like, too. Discoverability gets thrown out the window.

In case you’re excited about the Live Feed, you should be warned that Facebook has decided that 250 friends is a good amount to listen to, and they’ve picked this list for you! In order to avoid losing touch with the rest: