When Facebook rolled out its latest redesign earlier this year, a number of valuable features from the previous iteration more or less disappeared. The social network has promised to bring back a number of them, and has been making progress towards doing so.
The latest enhancement (or “re-birth” might be more appropriate phrasing) comes in the form of once again knowing when your friends update profile information – like their favorite bands, “about me” area, or a new profile picture. However, unlike before, this information is not featured on your homepage, but rather on the Friends Page, where you can now sort by “Recently Updated” profiles.
Facebook has also introduced a new filter on the homepage – “Status Updates.” This eliminates other information from the News Feed like things your friends are doing on third-party applications and also seems to hide updates from Pages.
Ultimately, Facebook (
) is giving users back what they want, albeit in a somewhat more cumbersome way than the old homepage that preserves the company’s own vision of showing you everything your friends are doing around the Web.
Most of the comments on the Facebook blog post about the new features are decidedly negative, but so far, users aren’t voicing their frustrations by moving elsewhere – traffic to the social network continues to soar.
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