Few time back, Facebook started experimenting with it’s news stream. As a result, Highlighted stories born, a seemingly novel idea to put news most important to user at the top, though the end result was nothing like expected. Most of the times, some stupid posts cover up your news stream and you completely loose the track of very recent stories. It seems if 4 or 5 of your friends have posted about a link, it is considered highlighted for you and kept above the news posted on your wall a second ago. This is pretty annoying, isn’t it?

I’ve seen quite a few users moving away from Facebook or at least shouting out loud in different forums/websites/blogs because of these changes and even I’s quite frustrated too. I mean, who’s Facebook to decide which story I want to read, most importantly when it fails every time in guessing that? Marking those stories as not a featured/highlighted post wouldn’t help either.

Till now, I was using some chrome extension to get only the recent stories but it seems that Facebook has finally heard our request.Actually, it heard few time back already, but the change was gradual and not all users got the control over the news feed (I got this feature today itself). With this change, now user can select if they want to see Highlighted news (current news style system) or the Recent news (the loved old style). No matter what type of news feed you choose, the pesky real-time news update will be there. So there’s no getting away from that, at least officially.

As this new feature is easy to miss, here is step-by-step procedure to control your news feed –

1. Just look for the Sort option in the top of the news.

2. Click on the Sort button and you’ll see two options – Highlighted Stories First (in bold) and Recent Stories First.

3. Select the news style you’re comfortable with and you’re done. If you prefer new Highlight style, only Sort will be written, else Sort: Recent Stories First will come.