In yesterday's post, I said that Facebook's new home page has changed its news feed so that all of your friends' activities are now posted in real time. I had thought the new feed included all the same types of info as the old one. I was wrong. (One of the difficulties of writing about this change is that I don't have access to the old version anymore to compare them.)
Reader Robyn pointed out to me that the new feed is missing a critical piece of information—alerting you to when one of your current friends has friended someone else (e.g. John Doe and Jane Smith are now friends).
This is a HUGE loss. The entire purpose of Facebook is to reconnect with people, so making it harder to find them is ridiculous. I know I have several examples of when I've added people to my network because I discovered a mutual friend had just connected to them. I never would have searched for them (might not have even remembered them), so this alert was really useful.
Now, if you want to find out who your friends have recently friended, you have to go to their profile pages and check the Recent Activities section on their Wall. And even then, unless you make a habit of going to every one of your friends' pages on a fairly frequent basis, it's quite possible these notices will no longer be recent so you'll have no chance at seeing them at all.
So I would like to suggest that anyone else who thinks this is clearly stupid send their thoughts to Facebook via their New Home Page Feedback form. Here's what I wrote (feel free to borrow from it):
Since the primary purpose of Facebook is to make it easy for people to connect/reconnect with each other, I was shocked to discover that you no longer include "X and Y are now friends" notices in the new News Feed. This was a really valuable way for me to find old friends again who had connected with a mutual friend.
Having this info only on people's Walls makes no sense whatsoever. Who's going to go to every one of their friends' profile pages to see who they may have friended recently?
Please add this functionality back to the home page. Ideally, it would go back into the News Feed, but you could also have a separate section in the right-hand sidebar that lists only the friending activities. The important thing is that you shouldn't have to go hunting for this information—it should come to you.
Thank you.
I've also started a Facebook Group called Memo to Facebook: Put Friending Info Back on the Home Page. Please feel free to join and to pass it along to anyone else you know who would like to see this happen. (To be honest, I'm also partly doing this because I've never created a group before and I thought this would be a good way to see how it works...:)
Posted in Facebook, My Two Cents, User Interface
