Not receiving everything from Facebook Fan Pages you liked? I say, “Good.”

People, specifically people running Facebook fan pages, have been up in arms a lot lately about how Facebook seems to just keep making it harder and harder for us to get our messages out to our peeps, our readers, our customers, whatever.  At first, I was among them.  I couldn’t understand why Facebook would do this to us.  We signed up for those updates, man!  We want them.  Give ’em back!

Recently, I’ve been thinking of this from a different tack, a different angle.  Mainly, I’ve been comparing Facebook to Twitter.  I’ve almost given up on Twitter.  I still post (rarely).  Mainly, I autopost to Twitter.  I never look at my Home page.  With the number of people I follow, it just moves too fast to track.  I just don’t have the time, or the patience, to read through the tweets.  In the time it’s taken to write this paragraph, I’ve received 10 new tweets (and that’s pretty slow).  And I’m only following about a thousand people.  Some follow a lot more.  Tit for tat, after all.

Looking at the mess Twitter can be, I think I’ve realized, at least in part, why Facebook did what it did.  I mean, I still think they wanted to rip us off, taking money for something that used to be free.  But now I think there was more than that.  Facebook took the initiative, realizing if people got every post for every friend and fan page liked, the news feed would be flying by so fast nobody would be able to keep up.  Nobody would be able to select a post long enough to actually interact with it.

In essence, Facebook is filtering your news feed for you.  They’re making it so the news feed is still manageable.  After all, I’m a freak, what with only having about thirty friends on Facebook.  Granted, the thousand-something likes I’ve done over time certainly makes up for it.  Just imagine if you got about 10X more updates on Facebook in your news feed than you do now.  I don’t know about you, but I would never be able to keep up with that.  I wouldn’t even try.  I’d give up on it much like I have Twitter.

Because it does filter, I actually peruse the news feed, interacting with authors, friends, and whatever else I might have liked.  Filtering the updates you see has kept Facebook relevant at a time where more and more people are getting bored with it, spending more and more time away from it, or quitting altogether.

Photo credit: stoneysteiner / Foter.com / CC BY

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