Facebook Killed My Newsfeed

We woke up to a whole new facebook this morning. Some of the changes, like pictures showing up larger in the news feed, are nice. Other changes are annoying.

You no longer have the "Most Recent" option to see updates in chronological order in your news feed. Instead, you have "Top Stories", the things facebook considers to be the most interesting.

The other new edition is what I like to call the Stalker-Ticker. It is on your right sidebar, and shows updates of EVERYTHING your friends are doing on facebook - a little scary.

This is my solution:

At the bottom of the left sidebar, click on Lists. This will take you to the a screen with a list of all the lists you have created (including the new lists that facebook added recently). I think that is the most times the word list has been used in one sentence.

Click on Create a List and give it a snazzy name:

Once you name your list, you will see this screen:

Click on Add Friends, or use the pull down menu on the right to manage your list.

Your box of friends will pop up:

Click on ALL of your friends (hopefully they look less pixely than mine) and click the blue Done button.

You will then find yourself viewing the recent updates from everyone in your new list. If you would like to add the pages you have liked, click on the Manage List pull down and choose Add/Remove Friends: 

When the box of friends pops up, use the pull down on the left side of the box, and choose pages. Select all your pages, and click the blue Done button. 

You are almost finished. 

To make it easier to get to your list, go back to the list page and click on the little edit pencil by your new list, and add it to favorites. This will make it appear near the top of your sidebar. You can see that I have several lists that are set to favorites, and they always show up. 

I am bypassing facebook's news feed and using my News Feed List instead. This ensures that I see everything being posted, and that they appear in chronological order, without any of that top story silliness. 

There is one more big bonus. When using a list to view your feed, the new Stalker-Ticker does not show up!!

Of course, you may not want to have every person and every page show up in your feed. That is your choice. You make your lists as large or small as you like. But if you want the option of seeing everything in order the way the old Most Recent setting worked, this is the best way I have found to set it up.

Tweet