Long gone are the days of mining through an endless News Feed to find status updates from only the select few people you actually care about. With Facebook’s new release for an upgraded preference-oriented software, users can now pick friends whose statuses and updates they would like to appear first on their News Feed. By creating a personalized list of “prioritized” friends and pages, Facebook hopes that this update will provide users with an even more personal, and ultimately positive, experience on the site.
“The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you,” Facebook reported when revealing the new update. “To do this, we use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you: specifically, whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on.” Combining Facebook’s infamous algorithm with a user’s specific personal preferences is believed to create the ideal browsing and networking experience.
Not only did Facebook amp up the basic News Feed, but they also developed their un-following feature further. Previously, users were given the option to unfollow friends, which allowed them to hide all of their posts, without actually unfriending them. Now, Facebook is allowing users to “reconnect with people [they] unfollowed.” This feature will let people unfollow friends for a portion of time and eventually follow them once more, without the hassle of having to unfriend and friend them again.
Greg Marra, product manager at Facebook, believes that these changes are necessary after a receiving feedback from a variety of users in November of 2014. Starting Thursday, Marra’s hard work to update the social networking sitewas revealed to iOS users. Android and desktop users will have to wait just a little bit longer before they are able to use the updated features. But for now, iOS users have the opportunity to gain more control over the interactions found on their personal social networks.