Facebook now has some neat new tools in place, designed to give users more control over what they see in their news feed.
Every once in a while, the social network is tweaking things here and there, trying out new things and rolling out various tools and features to improve the whole experience.
When it comes to one's Facebook news feed, i.e. the posts you see from your friends, the pages you like and the people you follow, the process was truly in need of an update. Facebook uses a computer software that takes into account a variety of information in order to determine what content it should show you in your news feed. Such information includes the friends you interact with most frequently, the pages with posts you frequently "Like," and so on.
While it all sounds good on paper, Facebook's algorithm can be a hit and miss sometimes, either flooding your news feed with information you don't really care about, or showing you older posts from yesterday or the day before instead of displaying your friends' latest posts.
With the latest tools, however, Facebook takes a notable step forward in the right direction by giving users more control over what they see in their news feed. Instead of having to browse through a vast amount of boring posts and unwanted information until you get to what really interests you, now you can select which content you prefer to see first.
"We just launched new tools to give you more control over what you see in your News Feed. Now you'll be able to easily choose the friends and pages you want to see at the top of your News Feed, and coming soon you can discover new pages to connect to," touted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"Our goal is to help you connect with the people and things you care about the most, and this is another step in that direction."
As you can see in the image above, new options now allow you to prioritize which friends should appear first in your news feed, as well as make a selection and "unfollow" those people you don't want to see, but can't unfriend.
The latest Facebook update rolled out for iPhones and iPads for now, but it should also hit the Android platform, as well as the Web version, soon enough.
