After changes during September 2011 altered how stories and updates appear within the Facebook news feed, the company is now offering a sorting method to bring back the previous organization of content. Announced on the official Facebook blog today, a new “Sort” link will start appearing on Facebook accounts over the new few weeks. After clicking the sort button in the top right hand corner of the screen, users will be able to reposition “Recent Stories” at the top of the page rather than remaining under the “Highlighted Stories” section. This move is likely designed to appease Facebook users that were vocal and disappointed about the reorganization of the news feed.
While the option to change back to chronological order is somewhat difficult to spot on the page, administrators of brand pages may end up benefiting from this change as more eyes are likely to see brand page updates in the recently posted news feed rather than within the highlighted stories. Facebook users are still waiting on the complete launch of the new Timeline design to profile pages. The Timeline design was supposed to go live for all users several weeks ago, but appears to be in limbo while Facebook developers continue to work on the project. Facebook officials haven’t set a date for the launch of Timeline and the company hasn’t publicly identified what issue is holding back the new redesign.
Facebook also announced that sharing blog content to the Facebook Notes application will no longer be supported after November 22. Facebook is cutting off the automatic feeding feature to encourage more people to directly post content to the Timeline. While Facebook allowed users to import a blog through a first-party tool under the settings menu, it’s possible that any third-party tool used to import content to the Notes application will also become useless.
