-Hi!
I'm Sharon Vaknin for cnet.com here to give you a spring cleaning project for your Facebook account.
When Facebook set top news at the default view, my news feed became completely irrelevant.
According to Facebook, top new displays post like at the most comments, likes, and shares along with posts by people who you interact with most.
But instead of letting Mark Zuckerberg decide of what content is important to you, here is how to customize your news feed.
First, switch the most recent view which is like a real time view of your friend's activity.
Now, it is not really a real time view because Facebook only shows you the latest post from people who you frequently interact with.
To change that, click most recent and head down to edit options.
Here, select show post from all of your friends and pages.
Now, this means that every single bit of activity will show up in your news feed.
Even updates from the annoying people who you didn't really miss when you were on the top news view.
So the next time you see an update from that person or page, hover over the post and click X.
You can actually choose to hide just that post which is pointless or hide all updates from that person.
They'll never know.
This also works for hiding apps like Farmville or Twitter.
Click the X and choose to hide all post by that application.
At this point, your news feed is already much cleaner, but there are still a couple of more options to make it even better.
This drop down menu gives you options to filter post by status updates, photos, links, and more.
Just below this options are your friend lists.
If you don't see any that's because you haven't created them.
Click account and then edit friends.
In the upper right is the option to create a list.
Enter the title of the list and select the friends you want to include.
I have a work list,
a list for just my close friends, and a family list.
Now, if you go to the news feed and select that list, only updates from the people or pages you included will appear.
You can make as many lists as you want.
One creative way to use them is to put all of the news brands into one list to stay on top of current events.
Of course, the most powerful way to control your Facebook feed is to unfriend people who bother you or delete pages and apps that you don't care about.
Facebook needs to make some changes though.
I would like to see a built-in
current events filter and the option to make most recent my default view.
It would also be nice to hide certain activities like new friendships or relationship status is that I don't care about.
Until then, these work around will do.
For cnet.com, I'm Sharon Vaknin, and I will see you on the interwebs.
