Facebook is part of our daily lives and when changes are made without being explained, it sends us into confusion.  That’s why I wanted to help people understand what’s going on with the “Live Feed” vs “News Feed” buttons at the top of your Facebook home page wall. Typically, I don’t write about internet and social media, but I’ve had lots of questions so I want to help.

Was a time (a couple of days ago), when you would go to your Facebook home page wall and get all of the status reports in real time from all of your friends and fan pages. The newest posts were at the top of the page and you would scroll to older posts.

As you can see from this picture of my wall, the new “News Feed” doesn’t show posts chronologically.  You can have older posts at the top of your wall and it seems that the times and dates are all jumbled.  What’s going on?

You may also see a notification of a number of new “Live Feeds.” If you click on “Live Feeds” you will see the wall you’ve become accustomed to seeing in reverse chronological order with the newest feeds at the top.

Why did Facebook make the change?

It seems that many members had so many friends playing so many games that facebook walls were getting cluttered.

To make matters worse, applications (like Farmville or Mafia or quizzes) started making bigger graphics and more graphics so they would take up a lot of space and be noticed on everyone’s wall.  **Sorry guys, I hide all those apps by clicking on the button to the right of the post and choosing Hide (application name here).**

FB gang stepped in to unclutter your wall by doing a couple of things.

• They took charge of the applications graphics. FB will allow only 1 picture  to appear in the app announcements on your wall.  Now, you shouldn’t see any more of these huge images cluttering your wall like this example below.
• The News Feed Features filters out “unimportant” posts. Facebook realizes that you have so many posts that  you can’t keep up with them all. They decided to come to the rescue by doing away with “pesky” posts by using certain criteria. This may or may not fit the criteria YOU would use to filter what you want to see.  In “News Feed” view, FB decides which posts are most important to you based on how many comments there are on a post, how many times YOU have commented and interacted with that person, and some other secret ways of their deciding what is important to you.

Personally, I want to decide what I want to see. Just because I don’t comment, doesn’t mean I’m not interested…I just might not have anything to say about it.

If, like me,  you want all of your friend’s posts in real time– the way it has been– click on “Live  Feed” on top.

If you don’t have time to read all of the posts, you can always create filters so you only see certain people’s posts on your Facebook wall.

Check out the next blog on how to unclutter your Facebook wall.

To see more info from Facebook on the change.