Either there’s a glitch in Facebook, or else it’s dead. Well, not dead, exactly, but I noticed that, at nearly 10 pm, none of my friends have done anything today to merit appearing on the News Feed of stuff (see above).
(The News Feed, for those of you with real lives, lists recent activity by your friends in adding little widgets, updating their photos, tagging other photos, and all that sort of thing that merits an evening at home.)
(And no, I’m not filtering my News Feed at all:)
(And yes, I do have some friends. Well, Facebook friends. They’re like fairweather friends except they don’t even hang around when the weather’s good:)
Now, this could be a glitch. A glance at one of my most active Facebook chums indicated she’s accepted flowers, a caveman and a fire in the past hour.)
And we should distinguish between activities and updates. Status updates are still going fine: 22 of my chums have updated their status in the last six hours. But none, as far as I can work out, have added an application, tagged photos or done anything that merits being put into the News Feed (indeed a lot of the activity in the News Feed seems to be a couple of days old.)
To me that’s kind of significant. If my friends have tired of Facebook as a place to hang out and do stuff, then how long has it got left?
I can’t speak for all the other fairweather friends, but what has happened in my case is that i’ve tightened up what goes into the feeds of all my friends and acquaintances on Facebook recently.
Facebook just launched a whole slew of new privacy features not too long ago and I decided to make full use of them to restrict what gets shown to the feeds of everyone else.
Looks like its working! 🙂
Ditto here. ~300 friends, and the most recent update is from yesterday…
Over the last two months I’ve personally noticed the exact same concerns you’ve addressed in your blog post. I emailed them at one time and didn’t get a response (I was curious in the logic myself).
In order to test this theory on my own I’ve reviewed my “news feed”, and then viewed the “friends > recently updated” tab to compare the differences. You’ll notice that what happens is Facebook seems to cache the information. Meaning, instead of updating “news feed” in real-time, they queue the updates to happen at once.
Furthermore, “news feed” has some kind of logic coded in order (even with out filters) to choose what to place on your “news feed”. There are plenty of times in which I’ve noticed my friends who’s changes are noted within “recently updated”, are not listed within my “news feed”.
…just my own unscientific anecdotal observations.
You do realize that the News Feed is widely being reported as broken right now, right?
Yes, I too have been experiencing these concerns. With all of the advertisement campaigns on facebook, which can be very successful if done right, I have come to the conclusion that it is an error and will be fixed soon.
YEAH! FACEBOOK SUCKS! SERVES THEM WELL!
That’s because it’s Spring and it’s totally beautiful outside!
Exactly. I’ve noticed this over the past few months too. It’s simply people putting more restrictions on what info. of theirs shows up on your News Feed. I might do a lot on Facebook in one day, but nobody will see it on their home page.
But remember the days when there was no News Feed and no home page??
Well you are right facebook is almost dead.. it was a hype and now people started to get bored from it as nothing interesting in fact… so all the facebook buzz will go time sooon… but other social networking like myspace will stay constant and people will continue using it because they are used to it and there is something given to them there as i believe… honestly i deactivated my facebook since like 8 months…
cheer!
ghalo
http://www.jean.ghalo.com
Glad to hear I’m not the only one wondering about this… when comparing Facebook to Plaxo on length of time to update…Facebook is definetly on the “not moving” side…
It’d be great to have a more real time experience – instead of the “canned” one we’re getting right now…
Quite a few people reporting broken news feeds, so maybe the funeral should be postponed:
http://tinyurl.com/58oz27
I see missing stuff, and I see no voting icons. You’re supposed to be able to “promote” and “demote” stuff. (The fact that they never seem to have an effect is beyond the scope of this comment.)
God, u almost scared me out… I thought Facebook was really dead for good seeing ur title above….
Well it’s back on track, usable again, but the new chat feature is awfull, go on and leave your facebook opened for a couple hours!
So true.
Many speak about that that facebook will disappear sooner or later, because of the loading. Very many people simply overload the server with the photos. And now also have increased the size of these photos I at all I do not represent that will be now. All that useful I receive from facebook it of dialogue on the social network Red Social de todos los Inversores