It doesn’t take a hurricane, a presidential debate or an Apple product announcement to find yourself overwhelmed by the ceaseless flood of updates pouring into your social networks.
Thanks to Zuckerberg’s Law — the belief of Facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that people share twice as much every year as they did the year before — there really is more information than ever before. Twitter posts can be generated at the rate of several thousand per second for some news events.
Fortunately, there are easy ways to manage Facebook, Twitter and Instagram so that your brain feels less engorged by feeding tubes of information.
Inevitably, the core problem is that you’re trying to see too many things. So first, you should embrace what the digital entrepreneur Anil Dash has called “the joy of missing out.” You’re not going to see every update from every person ever. In fact, that’s the big secret about controlling the waterfall of content that social networks mercilessly dump on your head every second: You’re not supposed to consume every drop.
Facebook designed its News Feed, which is the first thing you see when you go to Facebook.com, to deal with this problem. The stream of updates from your friends isn’t ordered chronologically from top to bottom, but based on how relevant those updates are for you, at least according to Facebook’s algorithms.
The simplest way to manage what you see in the News Feed is to “like” or comment on the kinds of updates you want to see more of, said Will Cathcart, a Facebook product manager. Based on those “likes” and comments, he said, Facebook “will try to do a better job in the future of putting similar stories toward the top of the feed.”
If you have the opposite problem and you want to see less of a particular person or kind of update, every item in the News Feed has a triangle-shaped icon in the top right corner. Clicking it will give you the option to hide the post. If you hide it, you’ll get additional options to change what kind of updates you see from the poster (or in the case of Facebook apps, ensure that you never see another invitation to play Diamond Dash again).
The settings get quite detailed — maybe you only want to see photos and music updates from a particular person — or you can choose to see “only important” updates. Important updates are determined by a number of signals, says Mr. Cathcart, like how other people are reacting to a post, but Facebook tries to home in on “things that are very meaningful,” like changes in relationship status.
You could also choose the sniper rifle option and “unsubscribe” that person. The elegance of unsubscribe is that it banishes their updates from your News Feed, but you still appear as friends, so there’s no chance anybody’s feelings will get hurt. (Though in 2012, everyone should realize it’s Facebook; it’s not personal.)
A relatively new feature that’s only been promoted to some Facebook users, says Mr. Cathcart, is the option to organize whom you see in your News Feed by creating a series of lists that streamline the process of picking which friends you want to see less of in your News Feed. To use it, look to the left of your News Feed or after you hide a post, you may be prompted to organize who you see in your News Feed. Designating people as “acquaintances” tells Facebook to only show their “important” updates, which cuts down on their communication. Conversely, adding friends to your “close friends” list adds more weight to their updates, so you’ll see more of them at the top of your feed. (Fortunately, these are private lists, so none of your friends will see how you rank them.)
Twitter has also adopted lists to make it easier to follow many different kinds of individuals and organizations without feeling overwhelmed. But they’re mostly the province of power users because of their relatively clunky format. The idea is that you can have a “politics” list, a “good friends” list and an “aging rock musicians on Twitter” list, all separate from your main feed, like a series of nested Twitter accounts. Residing under the “me” tab is a section for lists. You can create public or private lists, which can contain up to 500 accounts. After creating a list, you go to the profile page of somebody you’d like to add to a list, click the silhouette icon and see an option to “add or remove from lists.” You can access and track your lists from your Twitter profile page. Whenever you load up a list, you’ll only see posts from the accounts on that list. Unfortunately, you can look at only one list at a time on Twitter’s site or in its mobile apps.
Tool Kit: Facebook and Twitter Needn’t Flood Your In-box
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Tool Kit: Facebook and Twitter Needn’t Flood Your In-box
