Reality is Perception

PROBLEM:
I was looking at my Facebook news stream the other day, and I realized that I never see the status updates from several of my closest friends, including my husband!  I know they post and some very frequently.  I’m always switching over to the Most Recent list (linked at the top right of the news feed, in case you didn’t know it was there).

I then realized that I just crossed the 600 friends mark and all their updates, plus all the fans/groups/etc. that I’m part of fall into my news feed as well.  This is really becoming unmanageable!  Like the way I use Tweetdeck to separate out updates by topic/user/group, etc., I want to do that with my Facebook stream as well.

SOLUTION:
I was also playing with my security settings with my friend groups the other day and realized a solution to my over-crowded feed stream!

When you click on the Friends link on the left, it opens the list of my friend groups.

Then when I click on a Friend group, it shows me the stream from only the users in that group!!

Now, it’s kind of a pain to get there (since you have to click twice), but I usually at least have to click once to get to the Most Recent news feed anyway, so one more click won’t hurt for now.  Hopefully, this means that they will or already have made this filtered news feed available externally, so tools like TweetDeck could eventually use them.

You CAN setup columns in TweetDeck by content and by users, but there’s no way to use a Facebook group you already have setup.  You have to setup groups specifically in TweetDeck (hopefully just for now).

Click Add Column, then click the Facebook icon to get the FB options.  You can then select Everyone or Create a New Group, which will guide you to picking the individual FB users you want to keep track of.

Hopefully not a permanent solution, but at least for now I have a way to see the statuses of the people I want to stalk, I mean, keep up with.

Do you know of a better way to do this?  Please leave a comment and do tell!