Good news for anyone who hates their friends! Facebook has announced that it is rolling out a new Pages Only view that hides your friends from the News Feed and instead only shows updates from pages to which you subscribe. It seems like a strange move considering the problems Facebook’s been having with pages getting content to users through all the new promoted posts, but we’re actually pretty happy with this development. Now folks can read our Facebook page undisturbed by all their pesky friends.
We know the expected response to anything new Facebook does is supposed to be blind rage, but we’re in favor of this new view option. It’s nice to see Facebook introducing something we actually want after they shoved pages for couples down our throats. This might also be a way for Facebook to remedy the situation with page traffic being driven down by promoted posts, but it’s also a good way to drown out all the dog pictures and political rants folks are constantly posting.
The new view won’t change your normal News Feed, but instead gives you a link under the Pages Feed tab of the sidebar. Below the Pages banner of the new view are the words, “Recent updates from Pages you’re connected to,” but a more accurate description might be, “A few updates from Pages you’re connected to.” Comparing the Pages Feed with the regular News Feed shows that, at least for now, the updates from the Pages seem to follow the usual algorithm or a similarly unhelpful way of doing things, with no apparent way to switch them to sort by most recent.
The obvious benefit here is not having to engage with your actual human friends online, but it seems like Facebook is trying to give its users a way to stay connected to the things they like without having to rework their News Feed algorithm.
(via The Next Web)
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Published: Nov 15, 2012 12:30 pm