Yesterday, I posted Using the New Facebook Home Page Pt. 1, where I covered the new Publisher, which combines the status line updates with the ability to post other types of content like links, photos, and notes.

I also talked about the new News Feed, which now lists all your friends' posts in real-time. However, I said that it includes all your friends' activities, like the old News Feed, but I was mistaken about that. The new feed only includes items your friends have actively posted to the site—not the activities they've done on Facebook behind the scenes such as joining a group, changing their relationship status, taking a quiz, sending flair, or adding new friends to their network. While the first four on this list are probably no great loss, the latter is. I've written an entry specificially devoted to this topic, Memo to Facebook: Put Friending Info Back on the Home Page, so I'm not going to go into it more here, but I wanted to clarify my earlier statement.

In my introduction to the new News Feed, I mentioned that it could be a bit overwhelming and showed how you can hide the posts from specific friends. Today, I'm going to talk about another helpful way to manage the stream.

Facebook Filters

In the left-hand column, you now have a menu of filters that you can use to show only the posts of most interest to you. By default, it shows everything.

If you click on the Photos link, you will only see the posts where friends have uploaded photos.

Likewise, if you click on the Links link, you will only see the posts where friends have added links to other web pages.

You may have also noticed that when you choose a particular filter, the Publisher opens up to allow you to post the same kind of content.

There are more filters available by clicking (surprise!) the More links.

I don't know why they just don't keep it expanded at all times, since it's such a short list. Likewise, they don't remember that you did expand it, so when you go back to Facebook later, you'll have to click the More link again. However, you can drag some of these links above the line so they'll show without having to click that link.

The filters at the very bottom appear to be a weird mix of options from the various FB Applications you're using (e.g. Notes, Twitter) and random ones that your friends are using and that you may or may not have any interest in (e.g. Who Were You in a Past Life?). Some are there permanently; others rotate in and out. I have no idea what the logic is behind these choices; to me it would make a lot more sense if we could pick our own filters from a list of available ones.

The filters at the top include friend lists, which is a great feature for allowing you to create groups of friends that have different things in common. This is going to be my topic for tomorrow's post, so I won't go into it any further. As for the Public Profiles filter, I have no clue what that means, which tells me it's probably not anything I really care about having one way or the other. But if anyone knows what it's for, feel free to add a comment or e-mail me and I'll update this post.

One thing I'd like to see added is a Me filter, where you can just display all the stuff you've posted, since those are now included in the feed. I guess they figured that you can see that by going to your Profile page, but I think it would be a nice addition to the Filters list as well.

Now, some of these filters were available on the previous home page in the form of tabs. I'm not sure that the new ones add a lot of extra value, but they certainly don't hurt anything. I wish I could say that about the next item.

High Lowlights

As soon as I saw the new home page, I knew I hated this section. I don't mind the ad at the top—Facebook deserves to make money for the service they provide.

It's all the blocks underneath the ad that bug me. I have no idea by what definition Facebook has determined these would be Highlights for me. A lot of them I have zero interest in. (My personal favourite was a notice to join a group that was closed.)

In the old design, some of these would have been one-liners, like "Jane Smith has been tagged in a photo." That wasn't particularly intrusive. Now it's a giant ad-like block that stays there for some indefinite period of time (some have displayed for days) and there's no option to delete it and possibly replace it with something that MIGHT be of interest to me. Annoying beyond belief.

In a quick search, I've discovered that I'm not the only one who feels this way about this section—not by a long shot. So I hope that Facebook will reconsider how to use this area of the page. A better idea, I think, would be to allow users to tag certain posts as Favorites that would then appear here so you wouldn't forget about them as they scrolled further down the page. It would also be a good place to list those one-line recent activities. Anything but what we have now...

Finding applications

Another problem with the Highlights section is that it has usurped the box that used to be at the top right that allowed you to quickly get to Applications like Groups, Notes, Posted Items, Lexulous, etc. If you're looking for them now, you'll have to click on the link on the bottom left to open a menu of all your apps. A couple of notes:

• Even though the menu says Drag To Reorder, you can't drag the apps that are in the Recently Used section anywhere. Why? Who knows?
• When you move an app to the Bookmarks section, you also get a little icon on the status bar beside it that you can click on to go to that app without having to open the menu. Unfortunately, Facebook only allows you to have six bookmarks, even though the status bar could obviously hold a lot more. Why? Who knows?
• The Edit link at the top of the menu takes you to a page where you can adjust settings for each individual application, like which ones will actually publish stories to your news feed, notification preferences, and other app-specific settings.

Browse status lines only

One of the tabs on the old home page allowed you to view only the status lines of your friends. I liked this because I could browse them quickly to see what everyone was up to. Now, because they're mixed in with all the other posts, they're a little harder to pick out. It would be nice if FB added a filter for these as well but, since they don't currently, you can still find this feature by clicking on the Friends list in the top nav bar, and then clicking on the Status Lines tab.

You'll also notice that this is where you can see what YOUR last status update was, another feature that is no longer available on the new home page.

Well, that's it for now for my analysis of this redesign. If you have any addtiional specific questions or comments, please feel free to e-mail them to me at F1@TechForLuddites.com.

Posted in Facebook, How To, My Two Cents, User Interface