Last night Facebook rolled out a new feature to the newsfeed which enables users to filter the stories that are displayed. You can select to display only stories from specific applications or specific friend lists. This is an interesting feature but I’m not sure that it does all that is expected. Ultimately users want to be able to see more or less stories from specific applications and friend lists. This feature simply displays specific stories that you would like to see from one source.

Also, you are currently limited to the applications that you can filter from. For instance, I am only able to filter activities from within Events, Pages, Groups, FriendFeed and Google Reader. It would be awesome if users could select from any application or their bookmarked applications. Caroline McCarthy suggests that this is possibly a result of the applications that your friends have installed. Apparently my friends on Facebook are all geeks based on the applications showing in my feed!

Filtering feeds is going to become increasingly important as we begin seeing more news items. The model has yet to be perfected but Facebook is definitely taking the lead when it comes to trying various filtering models. Do you find these new filters to be useful?