Facebook tweaks its feed to highlight news that matters, while it matters

We probably won't confuse Facebook's front page with a Twitter stream anytime soon, but today the social networking giant announced it's fixing one big problem (again): surfacing posts while they're still relevant. If you regularly log on to keep in touch with friends, family or enemies and let the site order updates by itself you've probably seen it -- posts popping up days later with old news, or worse, something that was relevant, if it had showed up at the appropriate time. There's nothing worse than missing out on a late night burrito run (we suggest creating an industry-wide mailing list to coordinate your activities and agendas in secret) or missing an opportunity for a joke, and Facebook is trying a couple of things to change that.

First, trending topics will become more important -- now when breaking news like #Ferguson is trending, users won't be flooded with last week's Ice Bucket challenge videos. Also, it's taking into account when others like posts, not just how many likes those posts have. Erich Owens and Dave Vichrey of Facebook say the changes are rolling out gradually, so you may not notice them right away. What they didn't say unfortunately, is anything about Facebook's annoying tendency to switch back from "Most recent" view to the curated feed, or anything about letting users have more control over their own timeline in the future. Of course, giving users the wheel might get in the way of future experiments, but for now Facebook is just trying to make sure it's still the place to go for its billion+ users.