Facebook News Feed Preferences Return

July 31st, 2008

While Facebook simplified the News Feed interface a few months ago by removing the “thumbs up/thumbs down” ratings system, in-line News Feed preferences are now back in the Facebook redesign.

While before users gave feedback on a story, now users can give feedback on a story type or a particular friend: for example, “show me more feed stories about my friend John,” or “show me less photo stories.”

Facebook reportedly removed the first iteration of preferences from the News Feed because the factors did not have a significant impact on user satisfaction when compared to other elements of the News Feed algorithm. We’ll see how long this iteration lasts.

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Posted by Justin Smith

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2 Responses to “Facebook News Feed Preferences Return”

Manogr Says:
July 31st, 2008 at 5:45 am
That’s nice…

What I notice right now is that I can’t see most recent status updates in the right of the News Feed… I see only mine… strange….
Will Says:
July 31st, 2008 at 2:05 pm
@Manogr - Yes, I know. Now you have to click on the “status updates” button along the top, to see them. I don’t know why they did this; the extra step to see the latest status updates is definitely NOT an improvement in usability. It astonishes me how they keep adding/changing features, which don’t improve usability, while there’s so many bugs all over the place.

@topic - I like being able to better define my preferences, so that’s nice to see. But whenever I select “more about” some friend, it just tells me “Failed to save settings. Try again later.” I’m *guessing* this is because I already have 20 people in my “more about” list, and so it can’t add any more. But, really, how hard is it to check for that and return a useful error code?

Also, I seem to be seeing duplicated entries, now, in my newsfeed. Like wall posts appearing twice. And I wonder if that’s a result of choosing “More wall stories”. :p

And yes, I already reported these in “send feedback”. I seem to be averaging about 8 or so feedbacks per day about the redesign. Not that I expect it to make a difference, but I’m determined to let them know what I think about the whole redesign thing (which is, it has a LOT of problems).