Where Did My Friends Go? Right Here

The big Facebook F8 convention got us all prepped for some fantastic (or dreadful ) new changes that were going to set the world on end. Not everyone is seeing all of them yet, but they are taking place, and lots of people are asking one big question. “Where did my friends go?”

Though some people have slowed down about their Facebookin’ – mostly due to the big question – they haven’t really gone anywhere, you’re just missing them.

Have you noticed these new settings? Do you like them?

Change takes work…

If you are missing posts from your favorite people on Facebook, you may need to make some settings. By default, you will only see Most Updates from your friends, if you want to see them all…

What do you want to see from this user?

You can get to the above menu by hovering over the right corner of a post. As you can see, you can do a lot. I have subscribed to All Updates for this user. Unfortunately, you can only make these settings for individual users. I have yet to find a global switch, but I hope one is integrated soon.

Highlighted stories show up in the Top of your Home view now. You can choose to highlight a story by clicking the blue triangle at the upper left. (see above) Marking stories will help Facebook decide

What’s Important.

What's Important?

By default, Facebook will show you “Important Stories” at the top of your feed. They will decide what’s important based upon what you interact with and how. Change it to “Most Recent” to see chronological stories. Use the dropdown at the top right of the feed. This is actually a much more recent changed that I had been hoping for.

Time Keeps on Tickin’ tickin’ tickin’

Click to Hide

Lots of folks have changed their attitudes about the Facebook Ticker. If you have yet to discover or appreciate it’s nifty tricks, you can hide it so you don’t have to see it. You will also notice that it interacts differently with the chat box depending upon screen size and whether you use a sidebar for bookmarks or tools. Hit the little blue arrow at the bottom right by the chat. If you don’t see it, close your sidebar.

One change I hope to see soon is the ability to shrink the window size to just the ticker, so that I can see it while using another browser on wide screens. I’ll let you know if I find a cool plug for Firefox to allow that.