News Fed Up of Farmville Updates? Facebooks Takes Action

For a while, Facebook only ever dealt with the social aspects of people's profiles - what you were doing, photos of you, what you like etc. Then came the apps and their own updates, infiltrating everyone's new feeds with all kinds of new information about what games people were playing and what they were doing.

Although Facebook apps, in particular gaming apps, have proved to be very popular, only 40% of Facebook users are on the site for gaming, meaning that 60% are there for other reasons. Logging in to Facebook only to find your news feed dominated by games you're not interested in is not what everyone wants and clearly Facebook want to address this issue.

Mark Zuckerberg himself, CEO & President of Facebook, said he wants "as few people as possible come to the site and have negative experiences". It should come as little surprise then that Facebook has released a new blog post detailing what the new Facebook features they've just launched to deal with this:

• Full stories in News Feed so they won't miss when a friend shares an action or needs help in a game. The more active a person is in a game, the more prominent the stories will be.
• Smarter bookmarks on the home page that will automatically appear and reorder based on the games they're playing. They will no longer need to individually bookmark apps, and it will be easier to get to favorite apps.
• A clearer, highlighted number for pending requests or tasks alongside bookmarks.
• Requests in the Games Dashboard, where they can manage all their game activity and discover new games.

Zuckerberg summed up the new changes with this analogy:

"In real life, if one of your friends plays FarmVille and you don't, they probably wouldn't come up to you and say 'Hey, I just got this new cow on my farm,'" he explains. "They might say 'Hey, I found this new game that's really cool that you should check out.'

Source: Facebook Blog

 

** Disclaimer: I don't use Facebook. **

Facebook already has a way to block game crap from overtaking your feed. This only sounds like a new way to put it back in. :devious: I wouldn't trust anything Zuck has to say, he always means the opposite. Those games are big $ and that is what Zuck cares about, NOT users.

 

I just block things that I don't want on my feed. So far I have over 500 things blocked. Facebook is still not the spam site that myspace is though, and that makes it better ..

 

Me too, this update won't do much for me as I have most of that crap blocked but in terms of keeping less tech-savvy people/newcomers happy I think it's a really good move.

 

I just block the app and invites from it. I havent seen any since then

 

Yup. Facebook has been good with the blocking. Once blocked - it's stayed blocked, so no real benefit for me here.

 

uhm, how do I block all the game crap on facebook? I don't use it often but all I see is game crap on the news feed.

 

uhm, how do I block all the game crap on facebook? I don't use it often but all I see is game crap on the news feed.

When you go to the apps fan page, there will be a block button under their user icon, on the top left. ..

 

wow they actually made it really obvious when you go to your newsfeed

All blocked

 

I'm not sure if all are seeing it yet, but facebook has a new block button in the apps feeds as well when it shows up on your news feed.