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Published on Friday, 29 July 2011 12:00

HOW TO CONTROL YOUR NEWS FEED

You joined Facebook, added some friends and suddenly your News Feed is full of trivia and stuff you just don’t want to know about. If this is what it’s like now, what’s going to happen when you have more friends? How do people cope with hundreds of friends? - Only by controlling what posts they see in their news feed.

The first thing to realise is that there are two versions of your news feeds. What you first see when you log in to your Facebook Home page is what Facebook calls ‘Top News’. This is Facebook’s selection of what it thinks you will find most interesting from the stream of updates, photos and actions that your friends are constantly generating. If you want to view the raw stream as it is being created, you need to see the 'Most Recent’ news.

Select between 'Top News’ and 'Most Recent’ from the options in the top right hand corner of the News Feed panel. To set up which stories you want Facebook to show you, select the ‘Most Recent’ feed. That way you begin with everything that you haven’t previously hidden, and can go through the feed hiding what you don’t want to see.

Move your mouse over the News Feed and note the pale blue cross that appears to the right of each story as your mouse passes over it. To hide an item click the cross and choose from the menu that pops up:

• Hide this post
• Hide all by Joe (hide everything from this user)
• Hide all by Horoscopes (hide everything from this app)
• Report post or spam

Click the option of your choice or close the menu if you decide to do nothing. It’s a quick and easy way to prune your News Feed down to stories that you do want to read.

If you change your mind about someone or something you have hidden, scroll down to the bottom of the News Feed page and click the ‘Edit options’ link in the bottom right corner. The window that appears includes a box headed ‘Hide posts from’ which will list friends and applications that you have hidden. .Alongside each one is a little cross which you can click to remove them from the ‘Hide Posts ..’ list and restore them to your News Feed.

In the same window there is also a ‘Show posts from’ option, which lets you choose between:

• Friends and pages you interact with the most
• All of your friends and pages.

If you are new to Facebook or don’t interact much with your friends you will see little difference. As your circle of friends grows, the first option will keep your news feed more manageable.

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