How to Make Facebook Look “Old” Again

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It’s obvious. Most of us are not happy campers with the new, improved Facebook; in particular, the ticker and top stories features. Yeah, I understand it’s hard to leave your comfort zone but I’m siding with all of you; they’ve overdone it this time.

So some of us are frantically trying every suggestion that comes our way. Including me. I’ve found what I think may be the best one.

I created a list called “Whole Wide World”. You may want to call yours “News Feed”. I have included EVERYONE. I took each and every friend and added them to it. Painful because it can take a while to do. If you want to create a list with all or most of your friends here’s how:

• On the home page, place your cursor just to the right of where it says Lists on the left.

When the word more appears in blue, click on it.

• Select “Create a List”
• Add a bunch of friends to it
• Click done. Now click on the name of the new list of the left side. Suggestions of who to add should appear over on the right. Go through all those friends and add them to the list. This is a much quicker way to add them! When that’s exhausted…
• Click on the upper right where it says “Manage Lists” and add a few more friends by clicking on them. If they initially turn blue, just click on them again.
• Click done, click on the list name on the left and add the suggestions
• Working back and forth like this will get the list created a bit faster, especially if you have a lot of friends (say 300 or more).
• Under Manage Lists, you can control which updates you’d like to see. This is where you can unclick games if you’re not interested in them. The choices are:

o Status Updates
o Photos
o Games
o Comments and Likes
o Other Activity (this includes announcements of friends making new friends)

Now that the list is created with all of your friend feeds, it’s important to add favorite pages as well.
• Under Manage Lists, select Add/Remove Friends.
• Once the window opens with your friends, click on the down arrow in the upper left and switch to pages.
• Add pages you want to include in your list. Perhaps you want all of them? Hmmm…could be a good time to clean up all those lists you are on!
• Click done when you are done. This time, you really can’t do the go back and forth with suggestions. Sorry, it only works with friends.

Now you are done!

For now, this seems to be the way to control what you want to see. I also suggest that going to the wall of your favorite friends and under Subscribe, click on the option for all updates. Again, you have control here. Facebook assumes that you want “most updates” and has made that the default.

One thing I’ve noticed since I created my “Whole Wide World” list. I’m getting emails with additional comments from everyone else that has commented after me on a post. Not certain this is caused by the new list though. More work to be done!
One more thing. If you want to remove the ticker click here for Chrome users and here for Firefox. The Firefox addon requires a reboot after installing.