feed

Might we finally be getting the long-sought-after "dislike" button on Facebook?

The social-networking giant is working on an overhaul of its News Feed product, where users post status updates, photos, videos, and other items of interest, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Facebook is considering an unfiltered News Feed, which would dramatically increase the amount of content users see on their homepage, people familiar with the situation told the newspaper.

The site is also working on expanding the functionality of its "Like" button to include other hand gestures created by third-party developers, allowing users to … Read more

The Internet is the Best Thing Ever for news junkies, and RSS feeds help make it that way. Pmcc's News Messenger is a free news reader that reads not only Atom and RSS pages but also HTML, so it can read headlines from sites that don't support syndication. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or higher.

We extracted and saved News Messenger's program file, which immediately scanned for updated headlines when we opened it. The program displays headlines and brief summaries as well as time stamps in a narrow vertical column that can be configured to … Read more

Pulse News gives you all the news from your favorite Web sites laid out in an intuitive interface. News sites are laid out vertically so you can swipe up and down to the latest news from all sites quickly, or you can swipe horizontally to read more stories from the same site. Each story heading has the headline and an included graphic, making for a more elegant approach than other news readers that show only text links. Touching a story heading gives you either a text-based summary, a mobile-optimized version for easy reading, or a way to view the story … Read more

Winamp has been around for ages--it's one of the first media players we remember using--and it's still alive and kicking. Winamp Lite is a scaled-down version of the program, offering the basic character of Winamp with fewer features and in a smaller package. Although we personally find Winamp to be dated and awkward to use, hard-core fans will likely approve of this lightweight version of the software.

Opening Winamp Lite was a blast from the past, as its interface has remained largely unchanged over the years. It's still full of tiny text and buttons with hard-to-read labels. … Read more

Get in real time. At the top of your News Feed, click "Most Recent." Now you're viewing a real-time view of your friends' activities--however, Facebook is still only showing posts from people who it thinks you interact with most. To change that, click Most Recent > Edit Options > Show posts from all of your friends and pages.

Now you're viewing activities as they happen, which can get a little hectic. Here's how to refine this view:

Hide friends from the feed. Instead of unfriending someone because of his bothersome updates (like, "This chicken … Read more

Natali Morris is letting go of her peanuts and leaving CNET, but she'll be here until April 29, which means there are only four more Natali Thursdays left! In this edition of The 404, Google is making news with its latest social networking effort, +1; the government is developing a panic button smartphone app; and Reddit users are defending the integrity of the board against link fraud!

Pulse News for iPad gives you all the news from your favorite Web sites laid out in an intuitive interface. News sites are laid out vertically so you can swipe up and down to the latest news from all sites quickly, or you can swipe horizontally to read more stories from the same site. Each story heading has the headline and an included graphic, making for a more elegant approach than other news readers that show only text links. Touching a story heading gives you either a text-based summary, a mobile-optimized version for easy reading, or a way to view … Read more

A new Web app from Microsoft can bring life to your Web searches by using them to build customizable news-oriented Web albums.

Demoed at Le Web conference last week, Microsoft's Montage can take virtually any topic or keyword that you enter and create a Web page filled with articles and photographs grabbed from news sites, Twitter, YouTube, and a variety of other sources. You can customize your page with different layouts and change each section of the page to point to specific sources of information. When you're done, you can save your page and publish it or share … Read more

FarmVille is one of the most popular real-time simulation games on the Web and the most popular app on Facebook, with more than 60 million active users worldwide and nearly 25 million Facebook fans. Google's free Chrome browser isn't quite as popular yet, but it's gaining fast, with a growing number of cool extensions. FV Feed Filter is a free Chrome extension that lets you view and filter your FarmVille feeds in the Chrome interface.

We opened Chrome and logged on to Facebook. We then opened a new tab and downloaded and installed FV Feed Filter, which … Read more