Seriously, which does what, and why? Since the changeover I cannot figure out the purpose of the two “feeds.” Things seem, to my admittedly 38-year-old-eye, to just randomly be on one or the other.
I’m new to Facebook, but apparently, the change in views is one has “important” feeds, the other has all feeds. Live is the all feeds one.
From the Facebook Blog:
Essentially, news feed shows you what Facebook thinks you’ll like the most; live feed shows you every trivial little thing in real-time.
I couldn’t figure it out either. If you just want status updates rather than all the new crap: click on “more” underneath the list of stuff on the left hand side, click and drag “Status Updates” up to the top of the list, click on it, and voila less junk.
A lot of people are pushing the status updates fix that Baracus mentions, but I haven’t tried it because I do want to see pictures and links.
It seems that when I first load Facebook after a while, it defaults the News Feed, which can be handy if someone’s status from yesterday generates a discussion, but usually I see older boring stuff before I have to scroll down. Then I switch to Live Feed (which I think it will do automatically at some point), where I’ve been aggressive about hiding people and applications I don’t want to see.
Since the change it often goes completely blank for me, and I have to wait a few minutes and come back to the page to see anything. The actual benefits of these two feeds when they work for me are negligible. Pretty pointless change. I also dislike the seemingly random chronology the News Feed presents, what’s the rationale behind that?
I just thank Og that I can put Mafia Wars on ignore.
Ok–what if, over on the left, you have everyone divided into little groups? I have my friends ruthlessly subdivided, because some groups I check every day and other groups only once in a great long while. Is the feed I get when I click on that “live feed” or “news feed” for that group?
It’s all so dumb. I liked it before when I saw everything at once. I can scroll past the people I don’t want to read… or I can put them on ignore!
Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure it out, and it still just seems to be an item randomizer to me.
Then use Live Feed.
It seems to me that live feed is close, but not quite what we saw before.
This is like M$ changes in Vista’s interface. Changing what already worked well, just for the sake of change. Add the “what WE think you’ll like” as an option, but give us back our old default view.
Someone called it the Bored Housewife Syndrome…every few weeks, Facebook has to rearrange the furniture.
Like** Manda JO**, I ended up bypassing both systems, and creating a list which includes all the people whose updates I want to see daily (leaving off chattery evangelical relatives, twelve year old nieces, etc), and which does not involve FB’s guesses about my preferences. If you float this list to the top on the left, it becomes your default home page experience. I can then switch to colleagues or school friends by clicking those lists once a week or whatever when I want to see those sets of updates. This way, I get all updates (including links, notes and photos), can still block apps like Mafia Wars, and can sort my homepage to only reflect the updates I want to read routinely rather than FB doing it “for” me with whatever algorithm they use.
Oh, also, don’t forget to check your privacy settings–part of the “updates” meant a resetting of preferences so that now every time you friend someone it posts an update to all your friends. I detest this change, both on my own behalf and because I hate to see this as a status update from those on my friends list. For a while there right after the change and before people turned it off, “friend is now friends with some dude you’ve never heard of” seemed to make up 2/3 of my “live feed”. I haven’t see a way to turn off receipt of this particular type of update on the recipient end.
This reminds me of the education community. They have to be doing something new, even if it’s total bollocks. You can’t generate publicity by doing the same old thing.
Seriously, how does being the preeminent social site in the world mean that your system is broken? I just hope they respond to the users.
I can’t find how to make my Home Page default to Live Feed. I’m just glad I found out how to block these flipping Farmville updates.