The Facebook home page becomes more and more complete not only to keep in touch with friends but also to browse websites, using Facebook a bit like Google would be used. At least this I think is Facebook's ambition, to become the portal of access to the whole web.
For this purpose, two very important features have been added:
- One has been around for some time and it is the internet search provided by Microsoft Bing: by clicking on the box lens, you can select " Web Search " on the right side.
- The news of the last few days, on the other hand, are the lists of interests that allow you to group together the news from several people or the pages you follow .
In this way you can use the Facebook Home as if it were a feed reader or a personalized news reader, where new posts, news and articles from favorite sites or from companies and people appear.
Facebook lists are certainly the fundamental way to organize the flow of news and to be able to read without losing what best friends write.
Imagine having 200 friends and having "Likes" on 50 pages: it becomes impossible to keep up with the whole flow of updates.
By organizing friends and pages into lists, you can choose, depending on the topic you are interested in, to be able to concentrate only on a few things.
In another guide, I wrote how to group Facebook friends lists which is very useful also to be able to share photos or status updates in a personalized way, to show some things to some and others, to others.
Interest lists, on the other hand, are a new Facebook feature for organizing news from people you follow without being friends and from fan or company pages.
With interest lists, Facebook can become a kind of personalized online newspaper, divided into sections, each for a topic of interest.
Imagine then to follow Navigaweb on Facebook and other technology blogs.
You can create the list of Technology interest and group inside it the news coming from Navigaweb and from the other sites you are a fan of, scrolling the various news in chronological order.
If, at the same time, you follow sites like Repubblica.it, you can create the list of interest of the "News" by grouping the various online newspapers, if you are interested in cooking, you can group the fan pages that publish recipes every day and so on for the lists on Sport, fashion, news about a singer, music in general etc.
Instead of receiving updates of the pages in bulk, mixed with the news of friends in the general flow, you can put in order and organize your Facebook home by dividing the various news by sectors and categories.
The interest list should be visible to everyone in the list on the left of the Home page on Facebook.
If it is not visible, click on the " Other " item below the last link.
The interests appear, for now, automatically, if you are following updates of people of whom you are not friends.
If it is still not visible, just go to this page: //www.facebook.com/addlist to create the first list by clicking on the button.
In the first step you can select the fan pages concerning a topic of interest and also, if you want, the friends who usually talk about this.
After clicking Next, in the second tab you have to give a name to the list and decide if it can be visible to friends, everyone or anyone.
If you set " Public " visibility, anyone can subscribe to receive updates to that list of interests.
If you do not follow pages or people who talk about a topic of your interest, instead of creating a new list of interest, you can search among the lists of others, looking for them from the search box.
After creating or adding a list of interest, like every element of the Facebook home, you can position the mouse cursor on the new list (on the left side of the page) and click on the pencil to add it to your favorites and display the link at the top, for quick access.
Twitter users will notice a non-random similarity between interest lists and Twitter lists that function similarly.
