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Facebook makes quiet change to user's newsfeeds

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

February 17, 2011 | 3 min read

A hidden change to your newsfeed on Facebook has been implemented - “a change which you may have not even noticed, and might not want,” a writer on the website Technologizer has revealed..

“If you’re like me, and comment on your friend’s statuses and prefer to just watch others, you may have noticed some people apparently are commenting much more, and others much less,” says Ed Oswald.

“This is due to a change in how the site displays your newsfeed: if you haven’t commented, liked, or looked at a person’s profile regularly, they have now seemingly disappeared.”

Oswald says he noticed “something was up” a few days ago, “Certain people that are frequent Facebookers had suddenly stopped appearing. Was it something I said? Did they delete me? Nope, they’re still in my friends list. I then just chalked it up to those people just not statusing their life as much. It happens! “Then a friend posted one of those chain statuses which piqued my curiosity:

HAVE YOU NOTICED LATELY THAT YOU ARE ONLY SEEING UPDATES OR GETTING COMMENTS FROM THE SAME PEOPLE LATELY? Facebook made a change. You only see posts from people you interact with “regularly!” To change this, Scroll down to the bottom of the ‘newsfeed’ homepage and click on “Edit Options.” Click on “Show Posts From” and change the setting to “All Of Your Friends and Pages” *REPOST THIS*

“Sure enough,” says Oswald, “if you follow the directions, this option does indeed exist. And by default apparently (at least a half-dozen of my friends have confirmed this), the option ‘Friends and pages you interact with most’ is checked.

“So in essence, Facebook has made a pretty fundamental change in the way your newsfeed operates, and without much notice at all.”

He says he can understand Facebook’s desire to make this change to clear out newsfeed spam.

“At the same time people may be using the site for more than just to keep on top of their closest buddies. The site has done a lot to publicise changes in the past, why would it not publicise this one?”

Oswald asks, “Are you changing back, or do you plan to keep the new way?”

Let’s know what you think.

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