News feed in FaceBook

Posted on January 14, 2011

I thought I was losing my mind because I couldn’t find my friend lists in Facebook any more. They used to be over in the left column, but they disappeared. I finally figured out where they are after reading a couple of articles on using FB for a news feed, similar to Google Reader.

I use lists to segment my news feeds into names like family, business, almost family (subgroup of non-family friends), etc. That way, you can select that list, and filter out everything else. For instance, I always go to family first, because those are the people I’m most connected to. Once you have a lot of friends, it’s hard to scan for posts from certain people. It can take a lot of paging.

Anyway, back to news feeds–I saw several references on doing it, but no description of HOW to do it. Basically, they were saying you could access info as news feeds, similar to an RSS feed (like Google Reader). So, I started searching for a way to do it. I did find some, but they required installing an app, and the articles I was reading made it sound like it was built into FB.

Finally, it dawned on me–they were talking about using news as a list. Then, you add friends who are actually fan pages. Like Mashable, New York Times, etc. You’re not going to get exactly the same content you get from an RSS feed, but a lot of the same sources have fan pages, and they post that material there, too.

I tried it and it works. Adding fan pages is a little difficult, because I haven’t been able to see anywhere in FB where you can see a list of them. But, all you have to do is look at your default news feed, and you’ll see them pop up. Then you can just go to your account, where you can edit lists, and type in the name, and it will add them to the list.

So now, I have a Fan Page list, and I can look at that feed separately from family. You switch to a particular list by clicking on the down arrow next to Status Updates at the top of your home page.

» Filed Under Business, Family

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