On Facebook, a victory for the "change it back to what it was" lobby

Facebook has restored the option of seeing the News Feed of status updates and activities of all your Friends (I insist on capitalizing Friend when talking about Facebook in order to differentiate it from friend, since a Facebook Friend isn’t necessarily an actual friend). The feed was yanked in September in favor of a complex algorithm that brought you what it deemed to be the most important stories. Because who would know you better than a complicated algorithm on a for-profit advertising platform, right? People who favored the simplicity of a chronological feed were miffed and Facebook has turned the feature back on. This is classic Facebook: make a big change, get yelled at, back up a bit. It’s still an incremental move forward to what Facebook wants the site to be but it silences complaints for a little while at least.