Controlling Your Facebook Feed

If you are a new user to Facebook (there are 250,000 of you a day!)  or a regular user in the last year or so, then you’ve probably had this experience: You log in to your account and get bombarded with bits of information about people you don’t know or barely know.  You’re thinking to yourself, “I met you a few times; it’s wrong for me to know that you are newly single!” or maybe “Sure, I like doing business with you, but what you rank in a “Test Your Movie Knowledge” quiz just doesn’t matter!”  or something else of this nature (and maybe with more expletives).

Yesterday, a friend had this kind of outburst about old classmates from high school – it had been more than twenty years since he actually talked to many and yet he learned factoids and status updates about them every day.  There was something unsettling about the past rushing up and joining the future so quickly.

There’s a way to control what you see when you log in.  It’s just a little hidden, but here’s how:

1. Move your cursor to the top right area of the person’s information block as depicted in the picture.
2. When you hover there, a box will appear that says “HIDE”.
3. Click this and you will be given the option to either hide the person’s news altogether or to hide the application that is publishing the information (quizzes are the most popular thing to hide from my informal polling).
4. You should see a pop-up box that tells you that the “hiding” has happened and that person’s information should disappear from your screen.
5. That’s it! Facebook remembers your preferences and will either pull less information from your network or pull information from people you actually want to know about.

NOTE: The folks listed in my screen shot to the right are all folks whose updates I actually enjoy.

So why does Facebook have this function anyway?!

Facebook is all about connecting people to one another -  the best way to do this is to allow people to hear and see new things that others are doing or posting.  Ideally, that sort of “ambient findability” means that you can participate in someone’s life meaningfully by commenting or continuing the conversation — hopefully in “real life” too.  However, in “real life” we simply have preferences. So, Facebook gives users the option to shape the experience they have and the conversations they “overhear” or information they come across.

Next Up: How you can control the information that is distributed about you.