Facebook, part 2

The only reason I’ve kept my account there through all the things Facebook has pulled is because its the only contact I have with a bunch of people that I used to be good friends with.  After I moved out of state my contacts with them (partially my fault, partially not) dwindled and disappeared, so I was thrilled to see them on Facebook, where we could occasionally chat at least.

So this latest Facebook update has annoyed me to no end.  Don’t screw with my news feed dammit.  Its how I keep up with some of these folks.

Someone came up with a partial fix. 

1:Log into Facebook, on your homepage, in the top right corner is a down arrow, click on it, click on Account Settings in the box that pops open.  In Account settings click on Notifications, on the notifications page, in the top right hand corner is a box about email frequency, make sure it is NOT checked (default is checked and its a new “feature” so likely its checked).

2: Go back to your home page, if you have “Top Stories” sorted out of your feed by Facebook (seriously, talk about a stupid idea) there are two ways to unmark them as “top stories”, first on the top right hand side of each story is a down arrow, click on that, then click on “unmark as top story”.  the other, on the top left hand side of each story is a blue triangle, click on that (DO NOT DO BOTH, only one or the other).  Do that with ALL the “top stories” (note, apparently Facebook doesn’t ALWAYS sort out “top stories” so if you don’t see any don’t freak, just keep in mind what to do when they DO popup).

3: Now thats not perfect.  Facebook, in its ever so great wisdom, has decided that people’s news feeds were too crowded and thus things needed to be seperated out.  I don’t understand why, or  how they decide what goes in your main news feed or what, but unfortunetly there isn’t a good fix for this, only a really bad partial one (at least so far).  So, on the left hand side of your Facebook home screen is a set of “Lists”, defaults include “Close Friends” and “Aquantiances” among other things.  Now you can also create your own lists, so if you really want to be creative go for it, but that will only complicate things when you’re trying to read  your feed.  All you really need to do is put all your friends into one or two lists.  I sorted everyone by “close friends” (which means you want to see everything they post) and “Aquaintences” (which means you don’t want to see everything, you can change what you want to see on the list screen).  To do this, click on the list you want to add people too, then in the top right hand corner is a “manage list” drop down box, click on it, then click on “add/remove friends”  That will pop up a box with all your friends who have not been put into this list yet.  Click on everyone you want to add to this list, click done.  Now all the news from those people, that doesn’t make it into your regular news feed, you can see by clicking on the name of the list from your home page.  Yes its annoying as heck.

On a plus note to all this, as of 8am this morning viewing Facebook on the default browser on my IPad still shows the originial view, and  I’m hoping it’ll stay that way!  I also like that I can now go to  an individual person’s page and tell Facebook I dont’ want to see Game Updates from that person (you can also do this from the individual list page), as the Game Updates are annoying.  I’d figured out how to get rid of them under the old format, but it ment I had to do it for each game or app, now I can just say “no game updates” and there are no game updates, that IS cool.