Facebook Newsfeed hides friends, confuses users

Facebook changes to the NewsFeed
(Laurent Fievet/AFP/Getty Images)
Facebook is famous for tweaking its social site in a constant attempt to personalize the content. Some changes have caused outright anger. Others go almost entirely unnoticed.

The latter is the case with a tweak Facebook made in February. Combined with a series of adjustments to the site, Facebook instituted a new way to filter the NewsFeed. Users would only see updates from people they most often interacted with. Though Facebook wouldn’t comment on what it means by interaction, it likely counts which links you click on, which statuses you like and which profiles you most often visit.

The change went largely unnoticed, until recently, when people suddenly started to realize their Newsfeeds seemed slimmed down.

A note on Facebook started being passed from one status update to another: “Facebook has changed its NewsFeed again, so that by default, you can only see updates from people with whom you’ve recently interacted….Most Importantly… Re-Post this. Otherwise, only a few of your friends will actually see your posts.”

While the status has the right news — that the feeds have changed — it has the wrong directions. It instructs folks to go to the wrong spot on Facebook to select all friends, resurfacing the usual complaints about Facebook’s complicated user instructions. The correct way to make the change: go to the bottom of the NewsFeed and hit “edit options.” Change “show posts from” to all friends.

(Update: A BlogPost reader says that this way doesn’t actually work for him. When he goes to the bottom of his NewsFeed, older posts are loaded. He offers up this solution: “On my FB homepage, to make the change, I needed to go to the top of the page, click ‘Most Recent’ and then ‘Edit Options.’”)

When I updated my newsfeed my page suddenly went from full of work colleagues, whose links I often click on, to updates from the people I use Facebook to find: those not often in my life, but whose lives I like to keep up with remotely.

It’s interesting that Facebook felt the need to institute their own filter system, despite the many options of creating lists and hiding people from NewsFeeds.

It’s a stark reminder of Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble idea: that tech companies are trying to make decisions about what each person wants to see based on an internal logic. According to Pariser, the algorithims only bring back information that we’re comfortable with — information junk food — and leaves out the challenging differences.

Status updates from farflung friends never seemed to matter much until they disappeared.

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Facebook App 9/11 Memorial Lets You Dedicate Status Updates to Victims

Facebook, in collaboration with The National September 11 Memorial Museum, will ask members to update their profile photos or dedicate their statuses in remembrance of the victims who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

The 9/11 Memorial application, built by Facebook app maker Involver, was released Wednesday, just days ahead of the tenth anniversary of the tragic attacks.

“The goal of the application is to honor and remember victims of this devastating attack on America, 10 years later,” explains Involver‘s Senior Vice President of Marketing Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.

Facebook users can choose to dedicate their status or update their profile photo, and tell their family and friends how they’re remembering and honoring victims.

When a user selects to donate his or her status, the application selects from the 3,000 victims — which include victims of the World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the Pentagon, the passengers of Flight 93 and the six people killed in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing — and dedicates each status to a single victim. App users also have the option to choose to dedicate an update to a specific individual.

Coordinated with its launch, the application will be featured on a number of prominent Facebook Pages including the Pages of members of Congress, presidential candidates, federal agencies, non-profits and celebrities. Facebook and Involver will also feature the application on their own Pages.

The social media memorial and tribute is bound to reverberate throughout the social network, especially considering Facebook’s more than 750 million members and the smattering of partners featuring the 9/11 Memorial application on their Pages.

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