Remember when Facebook launched those News Feed changes a while back? A lot of people weren’t too happy with them. While the ticker was made available to see the most recent items as they happened, some didn’t like this approach and wanted a way to see the most recent strories in the news feed like before.
Well, apparently Facebook has heard the outcry, and has decided that it wll once again let you view by most recent. If you can’t do it yet, you should be able to soon. Some of us already have access to the feature as it rolls out. Here’s what the company had to say about it on its blog:
Now you have a new way of sorting your News Feed: most recent stories first. You can also continue to view highlighted stories first, followed by recent stories, like what you see today. If you don’t have the updates to News Feed yet, you can expect to see them over the coming weeks as the rollout continues.
Facebook has a help page, explaining how to sort stories in the news feed. In case you can’t figure it out, here is Facebook’s advice for that:
Click on the Sort menu in the top right of your News Feed to change how stories are sorted.
Recent Stories First: Stories will appear in the order they were posted. Highlighted stories will be marked with a blue corner.
Highlighted Stories First: Highlighted stories you haven’t seen yet will appear at the top of your News Feed. (If you don’t see highlighted stories, it’s because there aren’t any new highlighted stories since your last visit.)
This should make a lot of people happy at a time when Google+ is getting a lot of buzz. I wouldn’t say Facebook was in any danger of losing all of its users or anything, but this is still a smart move.
The News Feed viewed by most recent will still not include every little interaction like the ticker does (which is now getting some of those verb buttons like “read” and “listen” now), and that is probably a good thing too. A lot of people don’t want to have to sift through all of that, which means there is still a reason to have both.
Facebook talked extensively about its use of verbs to accompany “likes” at f8, and now we’re starting to see some better implementation of this. When the Timeline feature launches, these will play heavily into that, but in the meantime, apps should continue to gain significant virality through these buttons (assuming people don’t ignore the ticker more in favor of the news feed changes).