Facebook Adds New Feed And Friend Filters
Want to view which of your friends recently updated their profile? It is a feature that was lost with the new Facebook redesign, but as of last night, there are new filters which give you greater access to your friends' latest activities.
Context & Ripple Effects
Feed design has been a recurring flashpoint for Facebook ever since the 2006 site redesign first reorganized how users see their friends' activity, and every subsequent reshuffle has traded one kind of visibility for another. The latest round left a specific gap: after the recent home-page overhaul, users could no longer tell which friends had recently updated their profiles — one of the most-used signals on the old page.
The new filters, announced last night and picked up the same day on the official Facebook Blog, put that capability back as a selectable view rather than a default stream. Notably, the fix lands in the same week Facebook adopted new Principles and a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities through a community vote and updated its Platform Policy — a stretch where the company is visibly recalibrating its relationship with both users and the developers building on the opened-up platform.
First-order effects
- Users immediately regain a lost behavior: filtering the home page by friend-activity type, including profile updates, restores the at-a-glance awareness the redesign removed.
Second-order effects
- Application developers and page publishers now compete inside streams users can narrow at will, so feed attention concentrates toward whatever survives each person's filters — sharpening the stakes of the Platform Policy changes announced two days earlier.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook treats feed curation as an ongoing negotiation rather than a fixed design: each backlash produces a new control, making user-adjustable filters a permanent layer between publishers and audiences.
The trend: Social feeds are evolving from single editorial streams into user-tuned filter systems, with platforms shipping controls reactively after each redesign backlash.