PreCentral: PSA: Facebook's 'Close Friends' list will notify you of status updates, stalkers hitting 'Like'

[News Reporter]

Late last month,

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started pushing harder for users to add people to their 'Close Friends' smart list, something intended to help Facebook figure out which people you want to see most in your News Feed (personally, we'd prefer Facebook stop trying to decide what it thinks will be important to us, but we're cranky like that). The push involved a big banner at the top of the desktop site that prompts users to "star" friends onto the Close Friends list, an initiative they've been slowly rolling out across their userbase. We'll admit to not using the desktop site all that often (or Facebook anywhere, for that matter), but just yesterday we hopped onto Facebook, got the prompt, thought "why not?", starred a few friends and family, and called it a day.

That is, until later that night when we started getting notifications for mundane status updates that had nothing to do with interactions with ourselves. "Mary Jane uploaded a photo", "Joe Schmoe update his status: "Tacos!" ", "Pat Chris checked in at Pete's Eats", and the like. It was confusing at first, until we realized that Facebook was serving us status updates for people we'd starred onto the Close Friends list .

Without having received any updates in several months, we're impressed that the webOS apps (both and ) handled the new us-free notifications without skipping a beat, including proper links to the friends and their posts (and any links within said post) with nary an issue. We're also somewhat amused by the in-your-face-ness of the updates, as it'll certainly make stalking keeping tabs on your friends easier, and yet possibly more annoying. We like our friends and all, but we're not sure we want everything they've done popping up on our phones as it happens all the freaking time. We're close, but we're not that close.

Thankfully, you can kill the notifications, but you have to go to Facebook's desktop site to do it. Load up you Close Friends list (it'll be on the left, possibly hidden under the More link), click on Notifications in the top right, and select Off. Alternatively you can click on the Manage List button just to the right of that, select Choose Update Types, and filter out the Likes and Game posts you don't want or need to see.