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Want to view which of your friends recently updated their profile? It is a feature that was lost with the new Facebook redesign, but as of last night, there are new filters which give you greater access to your friends’ latest activities. On the new Friends page, you can click on the “Recently Updated” filter to view which of your friends recently changed their profile “or recently connected with Facebook Pages.”
What’s most interesting is that this wasn’t added to the homepage and was instead relegated to the Friends page. My guess is that Facebook doesn’t want to generate actual news feed stories out from users’ basic profile information. Facebook essentially opened up the feed but removed many of the stories that they used to publish to the main feed.
As Alexandre Roche writes on the Facebook blog, “We’ve added the filter for status updates to your home page, rather than the Friends Page, because the two play different roles on the site.” My interpretation of that statement is that Facebook doesn’t want to share the more personal information with developers. Feel free to interpret that statement differently though.
In addition to viewing your friends recent changes to their profile, you can also view their recent status updates with the new “Status Updates” filter that was implemented on the Facebook homepage. While it’s great that users have access to this information, I find it somewhat surprising that Facebook is now implementing the new Friends page as a tool for keeping certain information private.
It’s as though Facebook has opened the feed yet has moved a lot of the activity that users once had access to from their homepage so that developers can’t access it. In other words: Facebook’s feed isn’t truly an open feed. Regardless of the developer aspect of these new features, many users will be grateful to see these new additions. One thing that still appears to be absent from both the feed and the new Friends page is newly formed relationships.
Do you think these new changes are sufficient? If you are a developer, do you find it ironic that Facebook has relegated this information to a separate page and away from the feed?
Update
I should make one clarification. You can currently view that a user’s profile has been recently updated as a developer but what you can’t view is things such as “Nick just became a fan of The Oprah Winfrey Show”. It’s a relatively small issue but I think having access to those types of stories would provide value for any developer parsing users’ feeds.
My friends and I are totally lost with these new changes. I wish Facebook was better at communicating with users about the changes and how to locate features that have been moved.
Regarding filters, it’s not clear to me if there is a way to completely get rid of certain story types from appearing in the home page news feed. Or get rid of certain things for certain people. For example, I don’t want to see ANY application stories. I don’t care about who scored what on a game or who came out which way in a quiz. I really only want to see my friends status updates and only want to see photos and links from my list of best friends.
Any advice — either in your column or a personal reply — would be appreciated.
Rhonda
Hope that we can organize friend group from that filter too.
There seem to be ways now to pull up just status updates, and just photos, but I agree it’s not as easy as it used to be to see “the good stuff”. I’ve created a “People only” filter that contains all my friends, so at least I can filter out the Public Page stories when I want to, so that helps somewhat.
But, there’s still no way to see who is friending who, and I think that’s a big loss. That was a method I often used for expanding my own network, to see what names I recognized others connecting to.
Jeez. Your relentless complaints about the restrictions on the availability of items in the feeds for developers creeps me the fuck out. Why do you want ALL this info? It comes across as invasive and creepy.
And I’m a developer!!
Status Updates is a welcomed one - particularly those who want a less cluttered feed (or worship Twitter)
@Rhonda You could find the ‘Status Updates’ filter then drag and drop it at the top of the list above ‘News Feed’
Status Updates is just the status updates but if you like the few Facebook developed Applications e.g. Photos, Notes, Video, Links, Events (from memory)) you can drag and drop these higher up your filters and try to ignore the presence of the News Feed Filter as the must top filter should become the default page loaded one.
Hi I have a business page and would like to know how do i change the display url of the page currently it shows are facebook.come/pages/pagename/njjkkhskh , i want to change that to faceboo.com/pagename. Can someone help?
Well, what’s new then? every week they come up with another new feature, they change X - take off Y - add Z ect’ and they really believe that I have the time and the will to figure how to use them.
As I said last time I haven’t logged into my account for months (except for a couple of times using Facebook Mobile).
I think that the recent Twitter tweeted redesign has gone much too far…but sooo far that the right adjective to describe Fb now is pathetic (rather than fun and intuitive like it used to be one year ago = sad ancient history).
I am not great at Facebook but I use to go to my homepage and click friends. Then all my friends would come up with their current status next to the picture. Now it just has their pictures and I can not figure out how to set it so it does what it always did. Any ideas? Thank yo.
I want newsfeed of a few select friends to come to my email and to my internet explorer feeds. Please tell me how to set this up.
I would like to look at my friends list and read all thof their status all the time, instead of clicking on a certain name…please tell me how to do this.