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This morning we received a screenshot of a new feature which appears to assist users with finding “similar posts” within a feed. For example if your friend posts a status update, you can view similar updates by clicking a single link. Unfortunately the new feature doesn’t appear to be working perfectly yet as when this example pictured below was clicked a “working” animation showed up.
Facebook recently added a feature which enables users to display the most recently posted feed items without leaving the page in response to users’ request for a “streaming” version of the news feed. This new feature helps users sort through the increased number of feed stories that they now have visible. Since the redesign, users have been receiving an unfiltered view of their feed.
Depending on who you ask, some people like it while others don’t. While Facebook provides a “highlights” area, it’s still a limited view of your friends’ activities. Whether or not Facebook will use clicks on the “Similar Posts” link to optimize the highlights feed is unknown but that would surely make sense. For the time being, Facebook wants to enable users to filter their feed stories any way they desire.
For some users it has become overly complex while others like the increased level of control. Right now this feature appears to be in beta mode but I’d expect it to roll out in the coming days and weeks. Have you seen this feature in your feed? Was it working properly for you? Thanks to Luka Kladaric for the heads up!
This interaction point has appeared sparingly in my Stream over the last week, and from what I can gather by my usage of it, it actually bundles many similar actions by a single user who happened to produce many of one action type in a relatively short period of time. For instance, if a friend were to take and publish a number of LivingSocial quizzes, one after the other, only the most recent will be shown in the Stream, while the ones taken previous to it will be hidden behind the “Show _ Similar Posts” link. Clicking will expand all the published stories into view.
It’s actually not much different from manner in which the previous News Feed or Mini-Feed would handle multiple similar stories: By lumping them into one consolidated statement. Instead of “Amin loved Champion on Last.fm” followed by “Amin loved Pretty Wings on Last.fm,” the previous behavior would result in “Amin loved 2 songs on Last.fm,” where the term “2 songs” could be clicked to expand the single story into two stories.
this just puts the updates of my frens (if they have posted loads at one time-taking lots of space in the feed) in one link.
What Ammin said!
This is just a new version of story-consolidation. The lack of story consolidation was a problem with the new homepage feed. It was way too easy for my friends’ ditzy wives to fill my homepage will “sent a teddy bear” notices.
But it should be more than that!
So I’m quite sure I’m repeating what many others have said, but this has been around for about a week or so, and all it does is consolidate multiple posts of a similar nature so that a single user cannot spam their friends news feeds.
Just to confirm the above comments I also see this feature for about a week. It only consolidate similar posts by the same friend that occured on a small period of time like many shared youtube videos etc
Sweet. So they are repairing all the damage done by the recent twitbook downgrade one re-instated feature at a time. Am I the only one to suspect that the facebook redesign was one giant April’s fool joke?
Along with what others mentioned, this also saves us from those who have their Twitter feed post to Facebook (I have a friend who posts to Twitter 30+ times a day, that copies to his status). Very glad for it!
I’ve been seeing this consistently for the past week or so while following the Last Mission to Hubble public page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Last-Mission-to-Hubble/25618454345 (they post every few minutes with status updates during the spacewalk activities) — the feature has been working very well.
Hi - can you help with hiding the time/date stamps against activities on Facebook? There used to be a feature to disble them appearing but this appears not to be available any more?
I do not want people knowing when I have accessed FB or indeed to be able to work out how often I have accessd it.
Can you help?
B