The notifications panel on Facebook’s page admin panel wasn’t ideal. The hodgepodge mix of recent fan engagement with your posts was imperfect, confusingly splitting likes from comments for each post. This tended to work well for smaller pages posting less frequently, but on larger pages with multiple posts per day, notifications bordered on useless, and clicking on them led to an even more confusing list of notifications from the past week.
Not everyone is a fan of Facebook’s post-sorting algorithm, which determines News Feed placement based on with whom users would be most likely to engage. But if you’re trying to see more of your best friend’s Facebook posts, or fewer from a habitual oversharer, there is a way to set these preferences.
Tired of event invites from friends you haven’t talked to in three years who live across the country? There’s a way to fix that, without having the awkward conversation asking them to stop inviting you. Facebook recently made it harder for event administrators to invite large swaths of friends — a move that social media expert Mari Smith said might have been an attempt to combat the problem of unwanted event invites. But there’s a way to block invites based on who is sending them.
Facebook wants users to make sure they’re not missing anything on News Feed. Several users on the redesigned News Feed have started seeing notifications next to the home button on the top-right corner, showing how many stories they missed after straying to other parts of the site.
Facebook Thursday unveiled the closest thing to a Facebook phone, with Home. Select Android devices will have access to Home starting April 12, and it will later become available to more users. This news was met with curiosity, excitement, and a little bit of fear, knowing that Facebook would go from being a part of the phone to being a part of the entire mobile experience.
Some Facebook users are seeing friend requests that they have not yet responded to appear in the notifications area of their News Feeds, right under birthdays and events.
What does Facebook Home for Android, which the social network introduced Thursday at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., mean for developers? Facebook outlined ways that applications can take advantage of home’s extremely visual cover feed, as well as its notifications and Chat Heads feature, in a post on its developer blog.
Are you an iPhone user who hasn’t posted to Facebook in a bit? Facebook wants to change that. Spark Capital General Partner Bijan Sabet tweeted that Facebook pushed a notification to his iPhone, asking him to post something. According to Mashable, this is something Facebook is testing.
Facebook users who are suddenly being blitzed with ping sounds when they receive notifications while accessing the social network via desktops — including several of our readers and yours truly — have the option of muting those sounds.
Facebook’s latest attempt to promote its gifts feature involves a test of discounts of as high as 80 percent.
