90% Facebook apps = #FAIL for me. Have done LOTS of FB app blocking.

It used to be when you blocked an app appearances of friends using that app would disappear from the news feed as well.

Now every instance of a lame game or quiz or gift app somebody uses ends up in the news feed. #FAIL

While on the subject of #FAIL now the photo cant be removed from posting a link, no matter how irrelevant the choice of photos is to the content of the link. #FAIL

This is exactly what Facebook has now designed the platform to do… To allow you to share what you want with your friends.

The feed forms present the user an option to publish or not publish. This is not like a “one line” story which can be auto published. The user is responsible for an “short stories” that get published. Over time, they will realize that all their friends see everything they publish.

It will take some time getting used to, but now since FB is no longer deciding what is and isn’t relevant (like the way the feed used to decide for you what was important), the users themselves will have to make the “importance” decisions themselves.

In the meantime, I’ve resorted to commenting “who gives a shit?” to every story published that I view irrelevant. Am I mad at the app… no! That would be like me being mad at gmail when my friend forwards me a chain letter.

Applications, or better to say : facebook. We need settings for news story, urgently!

You are missing an important detail: the current API only allows stories in the feed that have received direct user approval. These are not automatic stories, they are stories that were presented to the user via a form and the user chose to publish it by clicking a button. Therefore, it’s user-driven spam, regardless of whether it comes from within an application, on the home page, or on the profile.

It’s not the app and it’s not the user. It’s Facebook. They removed the ability to filter the apps and now force you to remove the person posting the app from ever posting to your news feed again. Lame. Bring back the old filters and this problem goes away. It wasn’t an issue before the redesign.

I just yesterday posted complaint about all the apps announcements in the stream. I really don’t care what quiz someone took, or if they wished some random person happy birthday…

1. Blocked apps should not appear in my feed.

2. I should have a *hide-from-feed* on feeds from applications that i’m using, but doesnt want to see feeds all the time- just like i can hide a friend of mine that spam parties all day long.

I was a fan of The Onion but they started posting a link to every news story they were writing and it was dominating my feed. I went to Facebook’s settings and removed The Onion’s ability to send me updates but I was still seeing them in my feed for some reason and was forced to remove it to see friends’ stuff again.

Application developers will have to develop smarter programs and build in logic so it test to see when their application last made a comment on someones page. The user may be able to shed some light on how often they are willing to see news feeds from their application.

Giving them some control like, keep news feeds a minimum of 3, 5, 10, 15 minutes apart will leave them in control and hopefully prevent everyone from turning off news feeds completely. If it’s important to people perhaps a summary of those missed is sent every 6 hours. The summary is a link to the summary, NOT in the news feed.

Nick you are absolutely right, we need to adjust to the changes and application developers have to design smarter programs and give more control to the users.

thats funny Applications that I blocked show up in my feed. Some lesser known Public Profiles that I am a fan of don’t show up in the feed.

#FAIL

It’s neither users nor applications — it’s Facebook. Facebook should provide a real block capability. When I block an application, that should mean *everything* from that app, including notifications of other people using that app, should be blocked.

The fault lies with facebook.

For re-vamping and taking away all the tools that let us control how much stuff was put in our face (in our News Feed), while simultaneously robbing users of all the depth that facebook once offered (for those who liked Live Feed).

The new single-choice News Feed inundates everyone with trivia they didn’t have to see before, while removing the Story Types sliders that let people manage that trivia.

At the same time they got rid of Live Feed, which provided ALL the depth that facebook offered for those who did want to receive lots of information. It’s now much harder to discover new local events, new friend connections, interesting new Groups, see when friends have changed their profile (because they gained/lost an interest/hobby/job/relationship), etc.

They’ve gutted the site, ripping-out functionality. What was once unique, deep, & flexible, and good for keeping-up with friends, is evolving into a rigid and equally shallow Twitter clone.

And now you get everything in the most screen-space-consuming format possibly imaginable. It doesn’t help you manage information when you can barely scan through it all, while being forced to see 25 posts, each one saying “John gave XYZ a pizza”.

If you want to pressure facebook into fixing this stuff, see the protest guide at
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=61010781930

As for whose fault it is I will have to go with answer (c): the Facebook design team. Reading through the developer’s blogs there seems to have been virtually no warning about the changes, and the lack of aggregation in the new not-really-real-time stream-of-unconsciousness only makes things worse. Add to that the lack of filter functionality (the old-new layout allowed us to filter by message type and/or user), the exploded fonts, and removal of short and medium stories, and you’ve got a recipe for annoyed users.
I know that many internet companies have code monkeys. I never knew facebook took that term so literally …

@Montoya, I agree but I’ve noticed that some applications have appeared to work around that limitation. Perhaps I’m wrong though but do you think these users are really publishing 4 stories in a row?

Facebook is the cause, of course. It’s their platform.
Unless Facebook is run by fools they know to treat each application much like a virus until proven otherwise; it’s basic security. While you can blame any given application for anything, it’s up to Facebook to create a platform that enforces behavior that doesn’t drive away its users no matter how malignant and mal-intentioned application or users are.
Maybe users are to blame, but I suspect that users often don’t understand the full impact of these things. Regardless of that, I really don’t care about many things my friends do. I used to be able to ignore (’show less’) by friend and ignore by activity. Facebook removed the activity option. Now, if my friend thinks any one of their friends wants to know that they did something in an application, they default to telling every single one of their friends and all of us friends will see it in our news feed.
It’s a big nasty problem all around, imo. All they had to change was make the feed live but instead they made a ‘big bang’ release. Messes with their A/B style testing, too.

It is NOT the apps’ fault. As stated by others, users are *approving* these feed items. They are NOT auto-fed by apps.

Either the users are stupid, or Facebook made a huge (fatal?) mistake.

Personally, I blame Facebook for letting their blow-hard platform evangelist to convince them everyone acts/thinks like they’re in Silicon Valley.

Hey Nick.

I’ve left a comment on the relevant FB blog post about this, along with several 1000’s other complaining posts, here:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=59195087130

I said:
”
I’m not enjoying seeing 100’s of xyz took a quiz and got this answer. Really messing up my feed. I should be able at least to turn off feeds from particular apps, not have to turn off feeds from particular friends.

Also, why does a shared item I post to FB now *have to* include a picture? Previously I could say “no picture” but not now possible. Was starting to use this a bit, as opposed to sharing it via Google Reader, but often the picture options when sharing it via FB don’t contain anything that adds value or is even anything to do with the item.

The font style etc in the feed is also whacky. Too BIIGG!…

I like the idea of the new-style feed but the implementation is really not great.
“

The problem that I have is twofold:
- The default is for apps to be chatty
- As a viewer, I want to be able to filter what I see. If I never want to see another Hatchling but I do want to see other things that Marie has to say, I should be able to say, no more Hatchling. We used to be able to do “see more/less stories like this one” and I do not see that in the new design.

As Gerhard pointed out, the problem really is with Facebook dropping story aggregation with no warning. Before, if I sent 5 drinks to 5 friends, it would/could be 1 story with those 5 friends names. Now they are 5 separate stories.
I have feed throttling in all my apps, but it’s based on 24 hours. I carefully designed the stories so they would aggregate. Aggregation ENCOURAGED publishing many stories to he feed.
Dropping aggregation was a significant change. You can’t blame the app developers for not adapting within a week.

I agree that the fault lies neither with the users nor with the individual applications, but with Facebook itself. Prior to the introduction of the new homepage, I did not have this problem - on the odd occasion when I got annoyed with garbage in my news feed, I simply adjusted my feed settings accordingly.

It’s getting really annoying and putting me off Facebook, which is saying a lot, really.

I am very disappointed with the new facebook layout. In a way, I see how they are trying to improve some things but I feel they should have worked out a lot of the kinks before they officially changed it. I actually cannot follow my friends as well due to the newsfeed set up but I like the way I can group people. I also don’t like the changes on my profile page at all.

Thanks for this post. I now know why one day I had 68 Easter eggs posted in my newsfeed. This kind of stuff makes facebook look high schoolish and puts me off from using it as much as I did before. I spend less time on it now and am using twitter as my serious way of connecting.

Nice article and i feed your posting

The fault lies squarely with Facebook.

If I have 20 friends that take quizzes, or give gifts, that’s 20 friends that I have to pester to go into their settings and adjust stuff so that my feed doesn’t get spammed.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I could block an application from posting on my feed irrelevant of my friends settings.

But, I’ll go further than that. Why can I now not block the TYPE of story that I get? I can only block stories by friend, thus left with a choice of being spammed or not get important stuff.

THe bottom line is that I WANT stories that x is now friends with y. Even now, old friends (some of which I may have lost contact with) are joining up. If I see a name appear when one of my friends has friended them, I can do so myself.

I want stories that x was tagged in a photo. That way, I can then click through and see photos from a night out/wedding/party that I attended.

I want to know that y has joined a group. If it’s of interest to me, I can join too.

I do NOT want to know which Lost character one of my friends is, or if they sent one of their friends I may not even know a sheep.

i smell a conspiracy that facebook is to become a PAYSITE hahaha. 90% of world population will commit suicide then

Its facebooks fault.

Before, each user, as a publisher, could control what they published. Or choose not to control it.

And before, each user, as a reader, could choose what they wanted to see. Or choose not to control it.

Now, the second option has gone. So the only readers who are happy are the ones whose entire friends list publish only what that reader wants - a tiny minority. In fact, its like an old fashioned newspaper.

Fail.

I have stopped using Facebook - cold turkey - since the new update.

I have a relatively small amount of friends but my NewsFeed is - top to bottom - Top 5 lists or What Song Am I lists or What Move am I lists. Thats it - top to bottom. No way to block or delete them. And as soon as a “new” one appears, all my other friends that see it take the new quiz and suddenly its 25 more Top 5 Beer results. But there is no way to remove them - or to remove Twitter results. You can drag and drop them - but big deal. I want to REMOVE THEM.

I got so pissed that I just stopped using it.

wow! this site is amazing! it provide me a right info for my usage!

i find it weird that when you join a group or be a fan of something, you can’t turn that off from the news feed yet you can for other features and apps. or is this possible and i’m just not seeing how to do it? i’ve been trying to for months now.

i hate the way they spam up, how can i stop ext. apps from showing up?

”
Twitter users will typically place blame on the user and unsubscribe from their feed. Based on conversations I’ve had, users on Facebook typically place blame on the application not the user since their Facebook relationship frequently has a much higher priority.
”

Facebook should provide the option to block applications updates from specific users.

I love Facebook for being able to reconnect with friends, family and co-workers. I don’t even mind taking quizzes and sharing causes and such on some of the apps, but I would love the ability to be able to block or hide the News Feeds on things like Yoville, Mafia Wars and Farmville. I don’t live and breathe FB like some of my friends and these News Feeds have taken over my home page. It’s very annoying and I miss relavent News Feeds from friends who actually have something to say. Am I missing something or can we not control this ourselves?

Hello, I want to be able to see all Apps. and all Posts on the News Feed. ~ I haven’t been able to see any Mafia Wars Posts for over 2 days and I really want and need to see them so I can make points on Mafia Wars Job Help Requests. ~ If you can help me I would really appreciate it.
Thank You Very Much, Kathy

i dont want news feed on my home page because now i cant even say whats on my mind because it wont let me share!!!!!!!!:0