I read this post from my former colleague and all round good guy Steve Rubel: How to Bring Back the Old Facebook Feed РThe Steve Rubel Lifestream .

I’ve added my two bob’s worth in a comment below (for those who would like to go back to the “old” Facebook news updates, it provides a how to)…

I quite like the “new” Facebook, because it allows three options.

1. News Feed
The “new” curated feed.

2. Live Feed
This option needs to be modified somewhat to get the “old functionality back. Simply click “Live Feed” and then go down to “Edit Options” down the bottom. Then change the number in the field from 50 to 5000. It will then provide a full live feed of everything your friends are doing on Facebook – from links to apps to status updates.

As a matter of interest – this is a key product offering in the battle of Facebook vs Twitter. ¬†The new trend for search is “live discovery”, where people want to have instant results, updates and feeds. ¬†We see it in Twitter, we’ve seen it with the new changes to Google’s realtime search results, where Google can provide searches that provide live updates to the second.

3. Status Updates
As you said in the post above, Steve…

The thing I don’t like is that Facebook hasn’t made it completely obvious how to do this, so people are confused.

How sick are we of telling another website what our name and details are?

How sick are we of remembering our various passwords?

How sick are we of having to make decisions ‚Äì and the risk that it might not be the right one? We‚Äôre the options generation, the people that have grown up in such a period of change that we‚Äôre afraid of making commitments in case the commitment takes us down a path that is made redundant or is superseded, or just boring. ¬†HEY, there’s something new here or something better, why didn’t I recognise this earlier?!

How many abandoned blogs MySpace pages and Twitter accounts are there in the world? How many ex’s? How many old toys? How many false starts? How many career changes?

I guess the key is learning how to make a single decision well – so that you may never have to make that decision again. You’ve decided correctly.

Seth Godin talks about the stress of choosing Apples. ¬†They’re just apples. ¬†They’ll be eaten in a minute. Why should it be so hard?

As always, he’s a top read: Seths Blog: Fear of apples.