A while ago i wrote a post about Facebook stalking and how Facebook had created a news feed preference page so that you could adjust what sort of stories you see in your news feed. One of the most interesting things about this was that you could specify friends who you would ‘like to see more of’ and of course friends who you would ‘like to see less of’, however i am convinced that after the recent roll out of the new news feed that none of these preferences even work.

Hi, we no longer work

Here’s the deal, i have some rather annoying friends, people who i love dearly in real life but cannot stand the junk they post on Facebook. I can’t really remove them as friends because they are friends in real life, so i wanted a way to not see the crap they post unless i specifically go to their profile page. After the introduction of the feed prefs i added these people and sure enough they literally NEVER appeared in my news feed. Since the new home page roll out though, these people are continually in my feed and literally doing my head in. On the feed prefs page, it states…

You can select up to 200 friends that you prefer not to see in your News Feed. You will only get stories about these people if nothing else is available

Now i have over 600 friends (yes i am a whore and, yes they are not all real friends) and the people that I have added to the ‘see less of list’ are still appearing. Are you trying to tell me that out of 600 people, there isn’t enough ‘news’ that it has to show me MULTIPLE news stories about people i don’t want to see anything about? I think not.

To me, it seems quite apparent that the whole news feed prefs is broken and simply doesn’t work, i don’t know if Facebook know about this, or even if they care. But it definately needs looking at. Whilst they are at it, there should be away to stay friends with people but not show anything about them at all on your news feed.

Go ahead and try it, add someone who you know is a big Facebook user to the ‘see less of’ list’ and then watch as it changes absolutely NOTHING!

Facebook, please fix this, some of us ‘power users’ would like functionality that you offer to actually work, thanks.

I was checking out the hitwise blog, and came across an interesting post centered around the traffic growth of *shudders* Perezhilton.com… and no, i am not linking to it!

Anyway, the interesting thing about the post is that it states that according to hitwise numbers, Perezhilton.com now generates more traffic from Facebook than it does from Google searches.

Apparently…

Last week, 8.70% of visits to PerezHilton.com came from Facebook compared to 7.62% from Google. The switch happened the week ending December 27th, 2008.

then in the comments, someone else confirms that…

It’s a similar situation in the UK: 2.5x as many searches for Perez than Paris last week. 19.1% of Perez Hilton’s traffic from Facebook, just 12.0% from Google UK and 2.3% from Google.com

Now what else is interesting is that Facebook now accounts for about 3.3% of all traffic driven to video sites, Hitwise have provided the following handy dandy trend graph.

So to sum up the point of this post, whilst it may still be difficult to attract Facebook users to buy products from your site, it should certainly not be overlooked as a means to generate traffic to information based sites or blogs. I imagine that this trend will continue to rise, especially as Facebook look to launch its new real time homepage later today

The Facebook Connect world just keeps on getting better and better, not only do we have the wonderus Facebook connect core, we now have widgets for nearly every blogging platform and on top of that FB have released a new comments widget that can plug directly into your site with little effort and code.

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via their APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.

The Comments Box comes with additional social features:

• Fully customizable: Specify background color, text color, and other attributes by providing your own custom CSS to incorporate this best into your site.
• Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table.
• Administration and moderation: Manage the privacy and permissions of your comment boxes on an individual or global basis.
• Integrates seamlessly regardless of whether you do or don’t have Facebook Connect already on your site.

So as you can see it is pretty powerful, and you can get more info, plus the code from the Facebook Blog