Monday, June 25, 2012

Facebook promoting "Close friends" to increase activity

Did you see Facebook asking you to star your closest friends to one list called "Close friends" recently? Did you add your close friends and got loads of notifications of all their activity? And then switched off notifications on closest friends? If NO - you are gonna go thru the whole thing soon - so read on

As i explained in few of my previous posts - "Photo/Video sharing kills Facebook & grows Twitter", Facebook is losing activity due to the popularity of micro blogging platforms like Twitter where there is hyper activity. Another reason for this is the old Facebook users are now having considerable amount of friends&share pages and they no longer find the news feed relevant. In order to increase momentum and to make the news feed more relevant Facebook has started pushing "Friends lists" recently.

You will see a window on top asking you to star your closest friends. Facebook suggests close family and friends, giving you the option to select like given below.


Once selected - they go to the friend list "Close friends". Only pain is that by default Facebook starts sending you notifications for every action they do on Facebook (Like,comment,photo upload.etc). Worse if you are on mobile and much worse if you are on notifications via SMS like below.



How to remove Facebook close friends notifications?
  1. Go to your Facebook home
  2. See on your left side - There's a set of pages you admin, followed by groups and followed by friends' lists. Under the friends list should be "Close friends" category. Click on that
  3. On your rights side you will see a button called "Notifications" - tick that off.
Now you will get notified without being a pain as mobile notifications or SMS

Do you think this can make Facebook survive? Did you go thru the same "Close friends" add and remove notifications drama? Feel free to share your experiences...

2 comments:

  1. well close friends has been here for a long time, i think 67 moths or even more. there is a thing called restricted friends as well where you can add them and they will only see your public posts.

    Personally I enjoy close fiends feature. it's nothing new. with all the unwanted family members and all you can keep in touch with real friends on Facebook.

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  2. Yeah.. Me too find myself spending more time on Twitter than Facebook. FB feeds are becoming boring. (But the people who share and re-share those SHARE-THIS-POOR-KIDS-PIC-AND-FB-PAYS-ONE-DOLLAR campaings are mostly responsible)

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