Why is it that Facebook gets more annoying every time they make a major update to their layout? Hey, Facebook, here’s a novel idea. You’re a freaking social networking website, so why don’t you ASK your users if they would like or dislike changes you want to make to the site.
Biggest Annoying Change
Many of you have noticed that some of your friends’ updates have disappeared. This isn’t a glitch in the system, this was intentional by Facebook. If you have more than 250 friends, then you aren’t seeing all of your friends’ updates in your news feed. I don’t know what the criteria was, but Facebook went ahead and picked 250 of your friends and started only displaying those friends updates. This is so annoying, and it took me a couple of days to even realize this was happening. Like many of you, I am not on the edge of my seat waiting for Facebook to reveal news about their site, so I wasn’t in the loop about what was happening. Luckily, there is a fix. And in wonderful Facebook fashion, the fix is not intuitive, nor is it visible.
Step 1: Click on the link, “View Live Feed” at the top of your news feed.
Step 2: If you are already deliberately hiding friends on your news feed, then you can skip this step, because the “Edit Options” link at the bottom of the screen will be visible for you, and you can skip this step and go on to Step 3. But if ARE NOT hiding anyone, you need to deliberately, temporarily hide someone on your news feed to get the “Edit Options” link to show up to perform Step 3. To hide someone, hover your mouse over to the right hand side of someone’s news feed update. The “Hide” button should show up. Click on that, and hide the friend. You MUST do this, or else the “Edit Options” link will not be visible for you. Isn’t that the most stupid and ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen?
Step 3: Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on “Edit Options”
Step 4: A pop-up box will show up. Where it says “250: Max number of friends shown in live feed”, change the number 250 to 5,000 (the max number of friends allowed to have). Then click “Save”. You’re all done!
I told you that it wasn’t common sense to make this small change to your profile. Why Facebook decided to just stop showing you some news feeds is beyond my comprehension. The only thing I can think of is selfish reasons like it will help out their servers. Crazy that the 3rd largest website on the planet would be trying to cut corners like this.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great info, Erik. It took me a couple days to figure out what was going on too. You’d think they’d at least alert their users that changes were on the way…and explain why they are making them. FB just revamped it’s home page about 6 months ago…just when everyone was getting used to that, they went ahead and changed things…again. IMO, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Yeah, it’s so crazy! For a site as large as them with a ton of employees, you’d think they would plan this kind of stuff a little better. And again, why don’t you make it a social networking activity like, “hey facebookers, come vote on this possible change to Facebook”.