Facebook News Feed Filters – Excellent With One Exception

It is definitely great new that today Facebook is rolling out the filters for the News Feed to improve our experience with the feature of the social network. True, I actually expected more improvements right when the redesigned profiles were launched and I still think one huge thing is missing but the filters already make it better.

Logically, the new functionality launched today on Facebook allows for some additional filtering within the news feed where we see the updates of activity from all our Facebook friends right after logging in. So in addition to the traditional view where all the events are aggregated in a line on one page, we will now have new tabs that present different types of content - status updates, photos, and posted items. But you won't lose the aggregated view, of course: it will still be available in the tab named "Top Stories" and will actually continue to be the default view.

There are two things that I find rather appealing about the filters. For one, they allow for a better view of content and for easy consumption of more content as well. Normally when I log in to Facebook I only scroll down one page to see the latest few events from my friends' lives on Facebook - and I'm too lazy to browse to the next pages to see what else happened, especially since all types of content are piled together and are not exactly easy to sort out. Now I can already see a potential for a better consumption of the latest events, like you can take a look at all the links posted by your friends while you were absent or all their new photos by choosing the respective tab. Besides, the combined number of items in the individual tabs is actually higher than that in the aggregated tab (and I suspect higher than what we had before in the complete news feed as well).

Another good thing is a special tab for status updates. All of my friends seem to have figured out how to connect Twitter and Facebook to send all the posts from Twitter as their status messages on the social network. As a result, I can easily view all the latest tweets by my closest friends (as compared to Twitter timeline that tends to get crowded as I follow a huge number of various news outlets that push their latest headlines at me). So Facebook may well become a new way to interact with your friends on Twitter, especially since you can actually comment all the items in the timeline.

But I still see one huge thing that Facebook lacks - a separate tab for all the updates sent by applications your friends use. Right now I think it is rare that many people are so obsessed with each other to actually visit profiles and see what they thumb up on StumbleUpon or which blog network they join (by the way, I would love you to join Profy network as well if you use the Blog Networks application). It would have been perfect to have a special tab that could also aggregate all the events from your friends that are related to their activities on various applications they use on Facebook. And the already existing ability to comment on items could make it all that much more useful!

Of course, it may be a very serious threat to the mere existence of our beloved FriendFeed if a giant such as Facebook enters the lifestreaming game. But at the same time this is one thing that could bring lifestreaming to a really mainstream level of adoption - and this is definitely not something I myself could avoid being enthusiastic about.