Facebook 'See First' News Feed update to show all posts from specific friends

Site is the latest in a range of updates intended to make Facebook's timeline a little less mysterious

Facebook’s News Feed is a confusing and often apparently random place. But a new change looks set to make it at least a little more straightforward.

The site is adding a “See First” button to users’ profiles, which gives them the option to ensure that posts from those people are always put at the top of the feed. It is something like a reverse “mute” button — instead of showing nothing from the selected person, it will show everything.

Facebook has been attempting to make the News Feed more relevant in a number of ways — recently letting it watch how long people linger on posts to decide whether they’re important and promoting posts from friends over those from pages, among others.

The new See First feature has only been rolled out to a small number of users so far. A Facebook spokesperson said that the site regularly trials new features on Facebook.

Facebook’s recent updates seem to be an attempt to make the News Feed both more manageable and more predictable. Since it relies on a complex algorithm, the site’s timeline doesn’t have the obvious organisation of Twitter — where updates are just shown in chronological order — but Twitter has been moving towards showing updates in a way structured more like Facebook.