Surprising revelation about Facebook news feed

Sean Flynn, Leave a comment

After reading this post on Techcrunch I had a mix of emotions.

First, I felt stupid for never figuring this out before. Like many others, I have deleted a number of items from my mini-feed in the past, and every time I had assumed that those items would then promptly be deleted from my friends’ news feeds. Evidently this is not the case. Shame on me I suppose, for not testing and figuring this out on my own.

Then again, was I really being careless and stupid? Is it really that unreasonable to assume that a message indicating that “hiding will remove the story from your Mini-Feed and prevent anyone from seeing it” means that you are indeed preventing “anyone from seeing it”? Considering these two features (i.e., the new feed and the mini feed) were released at the very same time, it does not seem like that far a stretch to me. Techcrunch calls it “a poorly worded notification”. I call it blatantly misleading.

Finally (and most importantly!), it is just a bad product experience. Searching on Facebook’s help pages for “news feed” I came across the following question and answer:

Q: How do I hide my News Feed and Mini-Feed?

A: At this time you cannot turn these features off completely. Facebook allows you to prevent certain types of stories from being published about yourself. From the Privacy page, just click on the link titled “News Feed and Mini-Feed Privacy.” Unchecking one of the story types means that there will be no News Feed or Mini-Feed stories generated about your account for that particular action…

What this means is that it is either all or none when it comes to publishing particular actions in your friends’ news feeds. So for example, if I say it is okay to share events, then I have to be comfortable sharing all of my events. I can’t selectively choose which events are okay to share and which are not, which is really what I’d like to do.

Surprising revelation about Facebook news feed

Hulu is awesome

Sean Flynn, , 1 Comment

So with some of the TV shows coming back on the air this week for the first time since the writer’s strike, my DVR finally woke up from its long winter hibernation. Getting home late on Thursday night, I missed The Office at its regular time. Of course this was no problem for me because I knew that my trusty DVR got it all.

When finally watching the episode the next day (which by the way was absolutely brilliant), my eye was caught by a promo for 30 Rock. It’s a show that I really like, but since I’ve only seen it a few times, most of which were right before the strike, it never made it into my DVR recording list. So what did I do? I went to Hulu. Sure enough, right there waiting for me was “The MILF Island” episode of 30 Rock (nearly as brilliant as The Office). Once mocked by Google employees as “Clown Co.”, these guys are now bringing it. The video player is f’ing awesome. Turn down the lights for a more cinematic feel. Go full screen and still have great video quality. Embed or share the whole episode, or easily grab just the clips (you pick the starting and stopping time) that you want to share. And most importantly, they have great content (screw buying the A-Team DVD, you got it right here). Bottom line, this is what watching television on the web should be.

As a random side note, I stumbled on this this clip below, and am now convinced that Angela from the office (whose real name is evidently also Angela…who knew?!) is one of the greatest actresses of our time. Seriously, is this the same person? You can tell that Pam basically plays herself in the show, but Angela is like Jekyll and Hyde.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/12041/the-office-pregnancy-bombshell

Hulu is awesome