The news feed in Facebook has changed. Now, you see all the news in one place. Under news you can understand everything you can do in Facebook. You will see photos, status updates, posts from friends and from pages that you follow, photo tags, friend requests, event updates, group membership and everything else as well. The top stories come first and then the most recent stories. What are top stories?
Top stories are marked with a nice blue corner on the left side of the post. They are everything that happened in Facebook while you were not there and that Facebook deems news worthy for you. Here is how Facebook determines if a story is a top story:
“We determine whether something is a top story based on lots of factors, including your relationship to the person who posted the story, how many comments and likes it got, what type of story it is, etc. For example, a friend’s status update that might not normally be a top story may become a top story after many other friends comment on it.”
This means that a post that you make that did not get a lot of likes or comments on it might be buried in the recent stories in your Facebook friends’ wall – way down under the top stories, where a photo that got a lot of tags, comments or likes might be in the top stories. I think this is something you need to be aware of. Further testing and time will tell which aspects are important (besides comments and likes) to make a status update a top story.
I looked in my newsfeed and I do have posts that were posted at the same time (from different people) and one is in recent stories (way down) and the other is in top stories.
You can control what you see in your news feed up to a certain degree. Facebook gives you the ability to filter the news feed by friend lists and to hide the updates from a specific person or a specific story type. This gives even more emphasis how important it is to have your friends categorized into friend lists. Depending on the type of information you are looking for, friend lists will be a good way to see what you want. You can also decide not to the most updates from a person, but only the most important ones. Just watch the video to see how to hide and unhide a person from your news feed.
The second change in the newsfeed is the ticker. Now, you have in your top right corner a live ticker that shows you all of the updates of your friends in real time. In essence you will not miss an update as long as you are in Facebook thanks to the ticker. It is kind of like Twitter updates, just in Facebook. You can’t close the ticker either, but you can make it smaller by making the chat list longer. One word of caution: if you
unsubscribe or hide stories in your news feed, they won’t show up on your ticker anymore either.
Like with every change, it will take some getting used to it. Personally, I like the ticker a lot since it lets me see also which post the comment was made on or which picture got tagged.
Let me know your questions or thoughts about the newest change in Facebook in the comment section.