Facebook news feeds get more useful through new filtering options

August 13, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

I’m already a pretty big fan of the Facebook redesign, because it helps me quickly find out what my friends who don’t use other online social services are up to. My favorite part has been the tabbed news feeds, which let you sort based on things like photos, and shared links from around the web.

That feature got more useful last night. Facebook introduced more ways to filter feeds. You can filter by application, including Facebook applications. The company groups its Events feature in with the other applications, so now you can filter news feed using Events to easily see your social calendar. You can also filter based on your friend lists. I’ve been busy sorting all my Facebook friends into lists so now I can see what only a specific group is up to. Since I’ve separated college friends from friends in the tech world and elsewhere, I can now quickly filter to see just what my list of college friends are up to (see screenshot). That filter is a flashback to a time when my only friends on Facebook were college students.

The kicker, of course, is that it’s not clear how many Facebook users actually care about the new tabs, the ability to filter based on specific applications — how many people sort their Facebook friends into lists, by the way? — or the redesign in general. But that’s Facebook’s problem; personally, I’m happy with the changes.

Next Story: Austin Ventures near closing tenth fund, to hit $900 million target
Previous Story: Apple burns, no one hurt, no one fiddles

Bookmark and Share

Tags:

Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Facebook is one of the big social media. not only me , everyone like facebook. Now it has more filters. thanks for sharing
  • Great information. because I like facebook so much. thanks for your information.
  • Yes I accept with you. Facebook is big social media and very useful information.
  • Good news in this article. facebook is a one of big social media. thanks for your info.
  • jake
    Sure it is but there are new players emerging too such as yocial.com or mygogo.com
  • My Facebook account was gathering dust until recently. The recent changes have captured my interest once again. As an art blogger I find the site to be very useful for networking purposes. I have a group on Myspace with over 8,000 members, but I seem to get more traffic from Facebook. I've also noticed that a lot of my friends are leaving Myspace for Facebook. By making the site fresh they will continue to bring people back while impressing new members.