I touched on this in my last post, but since a good portion of visitors are probably reading this through syndicated feeds I wanted to post again since the edit about the broken link might be missed. Each feed has its own schedule for when it updates from my website so sometimes there is quite a lag when an edit is made to when it’s viewable elsewhere.

Anyway, Facebook once again made some wacko change. This one alters how the news feed on the main page grabs updates. Instead of loading all your friends, like it used to, it now loads updates from the friends you’ve interacted with recently. So if you haven’t commented on someone’s profile in awhile or vice versa you probably aren’t seeing that person’s updates. This also includes pages.

Fixing this is quite simple, though, just go to your main page and way at the bottom is a link called “Edit Options.” Since the page loads updates via AJAX you might have to wait for it to load a ton of extra posts before you get to the actual bottom and see the link. In that pop-up at the very top is a dropdown option for “Show posts from” which should be set to “All of your friends and pages.”

Easy enough, no?

Well, here’s the thing, I was alerted to this via a friend who linked a note referencing this change. After reading the note and changing my own options, I then linked the same note for my friends to see. I also started seeing other friends had linked the same note, but until I had changed the option their posts were hidden from me. A few hours later another friend sent me a message inquiring where the missing link went because they wanted to fix their option. I went to check my page and it was indeed gone; it had also vanished from all of my friends’ pages that had linked to it. Moreover, the actual note is “unavailable.”

Now it’s possible the author could have deleted the original note, though, I fail to see why she would do that when she was obviously trying to alert people to the new change. But I know for a fact I didn’t delete my own link to it and I’m sure my friends didn’t either, which means that Facebook is the culprit behind the vanishing links. And that just infuriates me. I’ve been increasingly loosing patience with their changing features and not giving notice to the users about the change or how it affects things. But actively deleting content from my personal page is going a bit far. While my link to the note might be viewed as slanderous — I did call Facebook stupid after all — the note itself wasn’t remotely negative. It was merely stating the fact that a change was made, since Facebook couldn’t do that themselves, and gave directions on how to fix your options. It also provided some methods of spreading the news to your friends, such as messaging them or tweeting about the change.

I don’t feel especially violated that they deleted a single link of mine, but the whole thing smells rotten to me and only serves to justify why I’ve never been much of a Facebook fan.