4-6: Celebrate your achievements with a life event.
Tags: Posts about tags let you know what photos or posts your friends have recently been tagged in and include a preview of the photos with your friends in them. Because of the way tags work, you may be seeing photos or posts that were added by someone who is not your friend.
Memories: You see two types of memory posts on Facebook. One is basically friends' posts from years ago, which Facebook has shown them and they’ve chosen to repost. They might add a comment or some context: “Never forget that seven years ago today I ran out of milk.” The other type of memory post is a video automatically generated by Facebook to commemorate certain milestones, such as anniversaries and friendiversaries (the day two people became friends on Facebook). Memory posts are great for a quick dose of nostalgia.
Facebook Watch videos: Facebook Watch is Facebook’s service for professional video content. Facebook produces original television shows as well as serving up videos from other producers such as Netflix and Hulu, or from Pages you follow from your favorite shows and movies. Videos from Facebook Watch automatically begin playing (without sound) when you reach them in your News Feed. To listen to them, click the volume icon. To watch videos in their entirety, click the video. You'll be taken to the Facebook Watch page, a destination in Facebook that compiles all video content in one place for easy sorting, searching, and viewing.
Likes and comments: Posts about likes and comments let you know what Pages, posts, or articles your friends have liked or commented on recently. Usually whatever your friend has interacted with is shown and linked so that you can check it out for yourself.
Changed cover and profile pictures: These posts often look similar to a regular photo post. Click through to look at the new photos on your friends’ timelines in their full-sized glory.
Events: Posts about events (usually letting you know which friends have RSVP’d “yes” to an event) include a link to the event, so if you’re looking for someplace to go, you can say “yes,” too. Only public events show up here, so if you’ve added a private event, don’t worry about people who weren’t invited seeing it in their News Feed.
Recommendation requests: Sometimes friends may be looking for help creating a vacation itinerary or finding a good place to buy new soccer cleats. They can ask their wise Facebook friends for help answering these sorts of questions by requesting recommendations. Recommendation request posts usually include location information and a map (like check-in posts) so that you can quickly figure out if you’ll be able to help.
Fundraisers: Fundraisers are ways for people to raise money toward a goal. They might be associated with a nonprofit or rounding up cash for a personal goal or on behalf of a friend. When you see posts about your friends’ fundraisers, you get some information about the organization or cause, as well as links to learn more or donate. Fundraisers are covered in greater detail in Chapter 12.
Read/watch/listen: Certain services and websites, such as the book-reading site Goodreads, may be allowed to automatically post specific actions people take on their site to Facebook. See Chapter 15 for more information about how these applications work.
Apps: Apps are services and features created by other developers that hook into Facebook and may be allowed to post on behalf of your friends. For example, a game might post when your friend reaches a new level or a workout app might post when your friend has completed a run. You can learn more about apps and games in Chapter 15.
Sponsored and suggested: Suggested and sponsored posts are ads. Ads are what keep Facebook free to use, so there’s no way to remove them. These ads aim to be relevant to you and your life and may even help you find Pages or services you find interesting.
Checking out stories
Stories created by your friends appear at the top of your News Feed, directly below the top bar. Stories are the most recent content created by your friends. Stories are a type of post, in many ways — they're created by your friends and are often a mix of photos, videos, and text. Unlike standard posts, however, which stick around on people’s timelines indefinitely, stories disappear from Facebook after 24 hours, and when you view friends’ stories, you see each friend’s story in the order they posted it.
For example, let’s say you have two friends, David and Alexis. David posted a few times in one day, each time posting a photo of an item for sale in his store. Alexis, instead, makes a story. Each time she adds to the story, she adds another photo of the event she has planned. The photos that David has posted may (or may not) appear in your News Feed over the next several days, depending on the activity of your other friends, how much attention any particular photo has received, and so on. You might see one photo, all of them, or none in your News Feed. The story Alexis has created, on the other hand, will appear as a preview in the Stories section of News Feed for 24 hours. When you click that preview, you will see each photo Alexis has posted, one after another, until you've seen them all. After you've seen all of Alexis’s story, you can move on to viewing your next friend’s story.
Viewing stories
When you click a story preview at the top of News Feed, Facebook opens Story Viewer, shown in Figure 4-7.
FIGURE 4-7: Flip through your friends' stories here.
Story Viewer has two main areas, the left side, which is white, and the right side, where the story is shown against a black background. On the left side you can see a list of friends (and Pages) that have stories you can view. The person whose story you're currently viewing is highlighted in grey. Below the person's name is some info on how many new posts have been added to the story (if any have), and how long ago the most recent post was added.
Now over to the story itself. Set against the black background, the story should more or less appear the same size as a typical smartphone. (Stories are designed to be created primarily from mobile phones.) Don’t worry if you don’t have a smartphone; we go over how to create stories from your computer later in this chapter. Click the next icon (right arrow) to see the next post in the story. When the story you're looking at runs out of posts, you can proceed to the next story until there are no more. Click the back icon (left arrow) to return to a previous post or story. When the story ends, clicking the next icon displays the next person’s story. To close Story Viewer and return to your normal News Feed, click X or the f logo in the top-left corner.
Facebook treats stories like slideshows, which automatically play or progress as soon as you open them. The thin grey bar at the top of the story tells you how many posts are in a story and where you are in the story. This bar is broken into segments to reflect the number of posts in the story. These segments fill with white as the story progresses, just like the progress bar in a video. If the story is progressing too quickly for you to keep up, click the pause icon below the grey bar. You can also turn the volume on and off or click the three dots icon to report the story.
Below the story is a bar for comments and reactions. Comments and reactions work pretty much the same in News Feed and stories, and are covered in the next section.
Interacting
