With their most recent update, Facebook has suddenly become a more viable place for me to post all my thoughts and opinions.

However, I'm still not a big fan of it when it comes to seeing other people's content.

The problem

Facebook shoves too much information down my throat, even if it's about people I care for.

The way it works on the rest of the internet

The things that you can post on Facebook (blog posts/notes, status updates, photo albums, sharing links) can all be released on other services.

Other people can subscribe to each of those sites individually – if someone posts interesting status updates, I follow them on Twitter.  If they take cool pictures or write insightful blog posts, I add those respective feeds to my RSS reader.

I follow only the things I am interested in – and because I can be picky about what I follow, I end up reading everything that comes through those feeds.

Facebook doesn't let me choose

The recent Facebook update gives the content providers (you and your friends) control over who CAN see certain information.  This is definitely useful, and I appreciate it.

But I don't get many options about what information I see in my news feed – if someone else publishes information to their feed, my only options are to

• Block ALL information from that user, and not see anything they post
• See every single thing they publish to their feed
• In the case of third-party apps, I could block the application and not see any information from that app, for any user.

If I have a friend who makes really funny status updates and posts a ton of photos to their Facebook album, it's all or nothing for me – Facebook doesn't let me select what I'm interested in seeing from the other user.

As a result, my Facebook feed is full of information ranging from interesting content to wastes of pixels.

I don't roll that way

I consume a lot of information over the internet – My feed reader tracks over 150 feeds the last time I checked, and I follow over 100 people on Twitter.  And I read almost every piece of information that comes through those feeds!

I can do this because I am picky about what I follow.  If I'm not sure that at least 95% of the posts in a feed are going to be interesting to me, I don't follow it.

If a blogger, Twitter user, or photo album is publishing more than a few new items per day, I don't follow it (no matter how interesting it is) because my feed reader would get too cluttered, too quickly.  I wouldn't be able to keep up.

It's not the fault of my friends

Well, not most of them, anyway.  Some of them do post really stupid stuff to their feeds.  But I can block those users without feeling bad.

Let's say I take pictures of local scenery fairly often, and upload them to Facebook photo albums.  Facebook photo permissions are set per-album – I would probably have an album set up to be publicly viewable to everyone (because why wouldn't I share those pictures with whoever was interested?).

Now, when I upload the pictures, I have an option to share them with people.  When I do this, the photo will show up in their feed (unless they've blocked me).

At this point, the responsibility is all on me – which of my friends would be interested in a photo of a sunrise just starting to brighten O street? I can share it with a specific group of people – maybe I even set up a list of people who I know like photography, and only post the new pictures into their feeds.

But those people don't get any say in the matter – if I post my new photos in the feeds of everyone on my friends list (which is the way Facebook has worked historically, and still acts by default), then those photos will be cluttering up their feed.

And if I try to be considerate, and only announce my newly discovered art to the few people I think would be most interested, then other people could be missing out – if I have friends who are actually interested in these photos, but I am not aware, I could very easily leave them out of the loop. And there's nothing they can do about it.

Facebook really wants to keep people happy

They're trying so hard to give people the tools they need to share their information reasonably.

I can understand why they're making the security so granular (so much so that it's getting really confusing to administrate) – security is something that almost everyone is concerned with, and a small group of people complain VERY loudly about.

But there's more to social networking than security

For people who care about the information they consume (and want to consume as much as possible), security settings do nothing.  They don't even matter.

If I'm not allowed to see someone's photo album, I don't care in the slightest – the only thing I do care about is whether or not I can filter the information that IS available to me, so that I only see things that are guaranteed to be worth my time.

And until Facebook lets me do that, there's no reason to consider using it as one of my primary social networking tools.