30 October 2011

Sort the new Facebook feed with Recent First

Facebook sort news feed recent firstAbout a month ago, merged the ‘Top news’ feed with ‘Most Recent’ in a single stream, with the top news, well, on top, and the rest of updates somewhere down the page. A pretty confusing and inconsistent setup, if you ask me; I never liked the ‘Top news’ and items served according to some secret algorithm. It looks like recently – I noticed this yesterday – they had a change of heart and added an option for users to sort the feed either by ‘Top Stories First’ or by ‘Recent First’. The small drop-down is located on the top right of the news feed. Unlike the previous design, this choice is preserved from one session to the next and if you are visiting Facebook from another browser. You can also directly access any of the two sort options through a custom URL, for example:

Similarly you can bookmark the custom URL of any of your lists and use it as your starting page for Facebook: each one has an address in the format https://www.facebook.com/lists/<list_ID> and you can find it by simply visiting the list inside Facebook and copying it from the address bar.

2 comments:

  1. From what I've seen, the RECENT STORIES FIRST option is not preserved. The view will revert to HIGHLIGHTED STORIES FIRST after a period of inactivity, just like before the current change.

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  2. In my case, for a while at least, it was the way around - it kept reverting to 'Recent stories' even though I selected 'Top Stories'.
    They probably tweaked the behavior after the release.

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