When the news feed first launched, I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Now, not so much. I’ve noticed recently that some of the friends I really want to stay up to date with, have removed themselves from the feed via the privacy settings, which is understandable. Except, if you (like me, and I suspect most) begin to rely mainly on the newsfeed for information, this necessarily subtracts from the value/usefulness of the overall site, as there is less of what you want and proportionately more of what you don’t.

Technically, I should be no worse off than before the news feed, because I can still click on “My Friends” to see what’s happening. However, the news feed creates the illusion that it tells you all that you want/need to know, when that definitely isn’t the case.

Is there a solution? Well, if you want to stay in touch with those friends so much, why not try the real world?

Or, maybe FB could let you have different privacy settings for different groups of friends? Though, I’d doubt that they’d do that as it’s suggestive of hierarchy, not a norm they’d want to promote.

ps: Just heard about a/the German version of facebook, it’s doing quite well: