Further Changes on Facebook: Not Only the Circled Number of Messages in the Inbox

This morning when I logged in to Facebook I realized that I saw something new - and that very little something was a circled number of new messages in my inbox. It was kind of obvious that it was unlikely for Facebook to update the design without adding any new features but this small one so I started to look for additional information (as I don’t believe in my own eyes when it comes to finding new features without someone pointing them to me).

My suspicion was quickly confirmed when I saw a post on FaceReviews about Facebook adding further filtering functionality for the news feed. Facebook launched the filters for news feed in the end of July and continued their development to introduce additional filters as we now see.

I am not sure if today’s functionality is a result of multiple bloggers (me included) asking to have additional filters to see the updates sent by various applications or if it was planned from the very beginning but this definitely is a much-needed update.

Since I am not the best expert in all the features Facebook offers I failed to notice a small arrow button in the upper right corner of the news feed but it is this button that lets you apply additional filters to the content you see in the news feed (in addition to the default ones for top stories, posted items, status updates, and photos). The new filters introduced today allow us to see content filtered by friends list (this reminds me to finally spend some time sorting my friends) and by applications that we have installed.

The filter by application will show you all the activity of your friends who use the same application as you. It is important that you can actually comment on all the items that you see in the feed and that’s a great additional advantage. For example, I can see Facebook becoming an additional FriendFeed client intended to track only activities of my closest friends.

For those of us who happen to have tons of friends on Facebook filtering by list of friends will be an even better addition because if you have a list for your family or former classmates, you will be able to see updates from this particular group of people by applying the respective filter.

These updated filters are definitely a much-needed improvement but it looks like we can never get enough upgrades from Facebook. For example, Michael Arrington thinks that Facebook should also enable us to subscribe to various updates using RSS feeds. I also think that the filtering functionality could actually be further improved if we were allowed to apply a combination of filters to be able to see updates both from a particular list of friends and from one particular application only.

Oh, and for those of you who care about the smallest updates on Facebook, here is the big change in how the new messages in the inbox are displayed:

Before:

After: