In my post from a few days ago, Facebook Changes: News Feed vs. Live Feed, I explained how the News Feed view provides a subset of posts from the last day (based on some incomprehensible Facebook algorithm) and the Live Feed view is supposed to a list of everything all your friends are doing in real time.

However, when some people choose the Live Feed view, some of their friends' posts are not appearing. If this is happening to you, here are some possible fixes to try.

Change the maximum number of friends displayed.

I mentioned this in that earlier post, but it does seem to have been the problem for some people I know. Once you're in Live Feed view, scroll down to the bottom of the page where the blue bar appears with "Older Posts" on the left and click the "Edit Options" link on the right. This window should pop up:

In the box that asks you the number of friends to display in your Live Feed, change the number to 5,000, the maximum number of friends anyone can have on Facebook (why they set this to a default value of 250 is anybody's guess).

Note: If that's not the window that pops up for you, close it and go back to the top of the page. Click on View News Feed and then on View Live Feed, and then scroll back down and try again.

If you have more than 250 friends, then this may very well have been the problem and hopefully now it's fixed. However, if you have fewer than that, it probably won't. In that case, some of the options shown below may help.

The other problem a lot of people are having is that they're not seeing the Edit Options link at all, so they can't access this dialog box. This has actually been a problem previously when people were simply trying to unhide someone and I've never found a definitive solution to how to get that link back. But here are some things that have worked for some people. (Facebook is definitely the king of inconsistency when it comes to which bugs affect which people...)

Hide someone from your News Feed.

If you've never hidden anyone, you may not get the Edit Options link. Follow these steps exactly:

• Move your mouse over one of your friend's posts and click the Hide button that appears.
• Click the News Feed button at left to refresh the page. Make sure you're still viewing the Live Feed. (If not, click View Live Feed.)
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Edit Options link, which should be there now. If it opens the popup window that doesn't allow you to change the number of friends displayed, go back to the top of the page and switch from Live Feed to News Feed and back again. Now scroll to the bottom and click the Edit Options link again. If this doesn't fix the problem, try one of the other suggestions below.

Note: If the Edit Options link still doesn't appear at the bottom of the page, here's another way to access it so you can unhide your friend again:

Update 11/22/09: It seems like the News Feed link no longer appears on my Friends page, so this step may not work. However, I'm leaving it here because it wouldn't be the first time that some Facebook users have options that others don't, so it wouldn't hurt to see if you have it.

• Click the Friends link at the top of the page.
• Click News Feed in the left-hand nav bar (under Lists).
• Click the Edit List button at the top. A window should pop up that lets you add your friend back to your News Feed.

Reload your Facebook home page.

This has solved different problems for me in the past, so it's always worth trying. There are different ways to do this and I recommend trying all of them, since sometimes one method will work where the other ones didn't.

• From your browser window, click View > Reload (or Refresh).
• Click the Facebook link at the top left of the page.
• Click the Home link beside the Facebook link.
• Click the News Feed filter again.

Log out of Facebook and log back in.

Again, this has worked for a variety of issues before.

Use a different browser.

If you have more than one browser on your computer, try logging into Facebook on the other one and seeing if you can fix the problem there. If you can, then the fix should stay in place when you go back to your original browser. If you don't have more than one browser (and don't want to install one), see if you can use someone else's computer and log into your Facebook account from there.

Note: If you're using Firefox, check what version you're using by going to Help > About Mozilla Firefox. In the window that pops up, if your version is 2.x, that might (MIGHT) be the problem. Mozilla has stopped supporting that version of Firefox so a lot of websites have stopped taking it into account when adding new features. I know I had some problems with various sites (not just Facebook) and ended up upgrading to the most recent version.

If none of the above options work for you, you may simply have to wait and hope that Facebook recognizes this has become a problem for a lot of people and figure out how to prevent it in the first place. You can try logging a bug with Facebook using this form, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a response.

About the Status Updates view

I've seen some people post that if you make Status Updates the default view for your home page, this solves the problem because everyone appears in it. However, the problem with this suggestion is that the Status Lines view shows ONLY status lines, not links that your friends post or photos or other types of content. If you do this, you'll have to click on those filters separately to see those posts. If you still want to try this, here's how to make Status Updates the default view.

• At the bottom of the list of filters in the left-hand column, click More (or Edit). All the filters will now show 3 bars to the right. This means you can move them.
• Click on Status Updates, drag it above News Feed, and release your mouse.
  

Now, whenever you log into Facebook, or click on the Facebook or Home links at the top of this page, this is the view you will see. Note that you can use this same method to make any of your lists the default view—Photos, Links, or a custom friend list you create.

Whew! That's a LOT of information to take in, but hopefully it has helped you get your friends back. If you've found any other solutions to the problem, please let me know and I'll add them to this post.

Posted in Bug Alert, Facebook, How To, Social Media