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Clean Your Cluttered Facebook News Feed For the New Year

by Amar Toor on December 13, 2010 at 06:20 PM

Refresh News Feed
A new year is just around the corner, which means it's time to go through the timeless annual rite of Facebook cleansing. After all, it's been a long year, and you've made a lot of new friends. That's certainly great news for your social life, but this newfound friendship has probably complicated your Facebook life too. Random acquaintances, long-forgotten crushes, anonymous former colleagues -- it's not that you want to shut them out of your life forever, you just don't wanna see them on your homepage, that's all. Don't worry. There are solutions.


News Feed

The News Feed, if you didn't notice, can be displayed in one of two views: 'Top News' automatically generates the latest status updates and activity from the friends you keep up with most on Facebook, while 'Most Recent' gives you a real-time view of everything all of your friends have posted, no matter how mundane. The obvious problem, though, is that there's no middle ground. You certainly want to know what your besties have been up to, but you probably have a lingering curiosity about a selection of other long, lost friends and casual acquaintances are doing, too.

The solution is simple. Just scroll through your feed in 'Most Recent' view, and see which unnecessary contacts pop up. To get rid of them, just hover your cursor over their most recent post, and click on the 'x' icon. From there, you can choose to either hide that specific post, or hide everything that person has ever chosen. In this case, you'd probably want the latter.


Lists

This entirely underused function simply allows you to chop your unwieldy anaconda of friends into smaller, more manageable garter snakes. Once you've done that, you can also control how much of your information each group of friends can see. A list of coworkers, for example, could be blocked from seeing the raunchy pictures that your college friends can laugh at.

Privacy benefits aside, lists just make it easier for you to keep up with the friends who really matter. Instead of searching through your entire community to find out what your high school girlfriend is up to, you can now go directly to your dedicated list of ex-girlfriends, and stalk away. Our friends at Engadget put together a helpful guide on how to go about setting up your very own lists, and it's definitely worth the read.


Groups

Facebook Groups If, on the other hand, you use Facebook primarily to stay in touch with a small circle of close friends and family, Facebook's new Groups might be a more useful option. This feature allows users to create their own, tightly controlled social ecosystems. To take it for a spin, just select the 'Create Group' option on the left sidebar of your homepage, set the privacy level and choose whichever friends you want to keep up with. Of course, they'll always have the option of quitting the group. But if they do, they're probably not worth your time, anyway.

Tags: facebook, facebook group, facebook groups, facebook lists, FacebookGroup, FacebookGroups, FacebookLists, SocialNetworking, tech tips, TechTips, tips, top

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