By now everyone should have the new Facebook, a redesign the company is touting as a leap forward from the previous version. In case you missed Rafe's hands-on with it last week, and our report from the press briefing the week before, the gist is that you can now filter the flow of information by groups of friends, and by application. The problem is that as a main feature, the application filtering isn't quite polished--and it shows.
Instead of putting all the information into one big stream and letting users pick how much of each type of news they wanted to receive (which was the old system), Facebook's new system relies on a set of filters to whittle down the type of content you see. It includes shortcuts to its own "apps" like photos, links, video and notes, along with third-party applications Facebook knows you use often.
Facebook's application filters are nice, but not customizable enough.
(Credit: CNET)As of right now, you can't go out and specifically choose which of these third-party filters show up on the left-hand side of your home page. You can easily reorder where they show up in the list, but there's no way to search for new ones to add, or remove the ones that are on there, short of putting them out of sight from your main list. Compared to the Applications "start" bar, which hangs out on the bottom of the screen, it's a big step backward in terms of customization.
Facebook's introduction to the new stream feed made the mistake of describing a system where users can pick which applications they want filters for:
By default, several common Facebook applications will be listed as filters. Users can choose additional applications from a drop-down list and add them as permanent filters. The applications that users and their friends frequently use and have multiple stories available for a user to view are most likely to appear in this list. This can be a great way for your application to gain additional visibility and usage.
Only problem is, the drop-down list that lets you choose which application filters isn't picked by you, it's picked by Facebook, and it's seemingly random. If you're a developer, you want your application here. It's where people used to launch applications from prior to the last redesign, and if a user can sort out only updates from your application--regardless of how recently a user's friends last used it, it might give you more uptake. Not to mention, if you have a favorite application you could quickly add it to this list to keep an eye on everyone's latest items.
A Facebook representative told me that while the company was not giving users a way to search for applications to add to the filters "it's something we're considering for the future." The good news is that you can "keep" applications that show up on this list, however it requires dragging them up above the grayed out line. This way they'll stay there the next time you log in, even if Facebook has updated them with new applications. In my case, logging out and back in again, and even switching to various feeds of friends did not refresh which applications showed up in that list, so Facebook may be rotating in applications at random.
Feature removal
Another gripe of mine about the updated news feed is that Facebook has gotten rid of the customization features that made it so insanely personalized. You can control the flow of information by lists of friends--a process that is simple to use, but time-consuming to set up--but gone are the sliders where you could control how much of each type of news you wanted, and who you were getting it from.
I doubt many users took advantage of these throttling controls, which is why Facebook likely got rid of them in favor of per-content filters, but for power users it was a great way to completely get rid of a certain type of news while still slurping in everything else all at once. Now, if you want to filter it you have to view just a certain type of news item and no others.
Along with those velocity controls, Facebook also got rid of the no-refresh-required live feed view, and the controls that let you limit what types of stories you wanted to monitor from certain people. You can no longer say that you don't want to see pictures or notes from someone, while continuing to pull in the rest of their updates. To a degree Facebook has built these into the new news feed, letting you "hide" people, although this is like scorching the earth when you could be pruning the hedges since it gets rid of ALL of the updates from that person.
In many ways Facebook has simply dumbed the feed down, which is great for mainstream users with a lot of friends, but it's sad to see some of that fine granular control go away--complete with all my old settings. Besides design, that was one of the things that really set Facebook apart from MySpace, and I'm sad to see it disappearing with each new feature release.
Remember that wonderfully mysterious Facebook preview group that reared its head back in March? Well it's been gone since the launch of the platform, but new features and interface tweaks continue to make their way into the system piece by piece. Here are three of my favorites that have rolled out in the last few weeks. Several more, and a roadmap for future updates can also be found at: www.facebook.com/whatsnew.php.
Vote on news feed stories you link and don't like. Your preferences will change what you see without having to muck with any settings.
1. News feed voting. Like the potentially upcoming Google search results tweak we reported on a couple weeks back, Facebook's already put together a way for you to tweak what kind of stories you're seeing on the news feed. Results of tweaking the sliders aren't immediate. Instead, the company says the new feature learns your tastes and adjusts accordingly.
There was already a slider for this in the feed preferences page, but now you can simply tweak them on the fly by voting a piece of news up or down. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to do much for the sponsored posts that make their way onto your news feed, but it's a lot easier than having to navigate to the feed preferences sliders.
Now you can turn any shot into a profile picture.
(Credit: CNET Networks)2. Making profile pictures out of any shot. Originally you could only do this with shots you had uploaded as your profile pictures from the edit profile menu. Now you can do it with any shot you've been tagged in, regardless of whether you uploaded it or not. There's even a little crop tool to help you grab your face out of a crowd. It won't let you crop down a shot beyond a certain invisible threshold, but it's far better than having to save the file locally to make edits, or having to kick it out to a third-party service like Picnik or Fotoflexer.
3. Outside e-mails actually mean something. Facebook has finally gone about opening up their outside messages to anyone you e-mail. Previously, if you e-mailed someone with a message--be it a wall post, or private message, they'd get an e-mail facebook telling them your name and a link to go see it (which required signing in). Now you get the complete message without having to jump through the hoops. You still have to respond via Facebook, but there's a link in the e-mail that takes you straight to the composition screen. Unfortunately this doesn't work with their events service.
See also: 7 cool, unadvertised Facebook features, which includes an early version of the profile picture picker, albeit with a little less pizazz.
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