The new Facebook subscribe button supposedly takes care of this by providing users with better news feed controls. The button will appear later this week on profiles of friends and other users provided that they have activated the feature for non-friends.

The button serves three main purposes according to Facebook’s Zach Rait, who posted the news on the official Facebook blog.

The button can be used to choose what Facebook users see from people in their news feed, to read news from users who are not friends and to provide others with options to read your news if they are not your friend.

The subscribe button when opened can be used to configure which news appear in a user’s news feed. This ranges from all updates over most updates to important updates only. There are further options to select the types of updates that should be posted to a news feed. This can be status updates, photos, games or live events.

Facebook users who do not want anything to change can just ignore the button to receive the same amount of news as before.

Subscribe buttons will also be displayed on other people’s pages, like journalists, political figures, celebrities or artists. The subscribe button can be used to subscribe to the news that get posted by that person. The news are then automatically integrated into the standard news feed on Facebook.

The new subscribe page offers information about the procedure. It is an opt-in process which means that users need to enable it on Facebook before it becomes available on their profile.

What’s your take on the new subscribe button on Facebook?

Most Facebook users have friends who spam the news feed with silly game and application updates or other unimportant updates. Facebook has implemented options to block specific single updates or all updates from a user or application.

Lets take a closer look at how you can block these updates from appearing in the Facebook News Feed. For this, I have taken a post from Ghacks writer Mike Halsey as an example, and I hope he does not mind.

When you move the mouse in the area of the news feed update, you will notice an x in the upper right corner of the update. If you left-click on the x three options appear:

• Hide this post: Hides the selected post from the news feed, but will allow all other posts by the friend to appear in the news feed.
• Hide all by (username): Hides all posts from the user immediately. This means all posts of the friend are removed from the news feed, and no new posts will be posted on the feed in the future.
• Mark as spam: If a post is spam, i.e. advertisement, you can mark it as spam.

There may come a time where you want to display a Facebook friend’s post again. To do this you need to scroll to the bottom of the news feed page on Facebook, and click the Edit Options link there.

This opens an overlay with a list of all friends that are currently hidden in the news feed.

You can use the add to news feed button to add their posts to the news feed again. There is also an option to enable hidden applications from appearing in the news feed again.

FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 comes with several interesting new features and also one drawback which will be addressed later on. The short setup wizard will be started even if an older FeedDemon version is installed on the computer system. This might confuse users as it could seem that all feeds that have been added to that version have been lost during the upgrade. This is however not the case. The old feeds will be integrated into the new version. This takes some time as the feed items are imported and the databases checked.

The first thing that springs to mind is the new interface that looks friendly to the eye. The RSS feeds are still listed in the left sidebar and the contents in the main right window. A new addition is a small advertising window at the bottom left of the screen. That’s the drawback that I mentioned earlier on in the article. The advertisement is not really that obtrusive but could irritate or annoy some of the users.

A lot of new features have been added to this version of FeedDemon including tagging support for items which can be synchronized with Newsgator and displayed in various ways including a tag cloud at the Subscriptions Homepage. Multiple new features have been added for Twitter users like subscribing to Twitter feeds with avatar images, Twitter timelines, balloon popups for short urls that display the redirected page, replying to Twitter posts directly, automatic hyperlinking of information in Twitter feeds, the ability to send links to Twitter and even a Twitter search engine.

That’s a lot of additions for Twitter users but that’s only a tiny fraction of all the new features of FeedDemon. Users can now import Google Reader subscriptions directly but still no Google Reader synchronization. This feature is planned and it might be released in upcoming versions of FeedDemon 3.

Performance has been improved quite a bit especially when searching subscriptions or browsing popular topics. There are two interesting – and new – export options available. The first will export feeds in newspaper format into an external html document. Excellent for sending someone else a compilation of interesting feeds in that format. The second is to export the top feeds only.

Interested users can take a look at the full changelog of FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 here. This is also the location from where the RSS reader can be downloaded to the local computer system.

A user of Feedrinse may add up to 500 feeds to the service and group those feeds in different channels. He can do so by adding them manually in a web form or importing a opml file that contains a list of feeds. The filters can then be configured for feeds individually or for every channel.

The filter options can be used to allow or disallow feed items that do or do not contain specified posts, titles, bodies, tags or authors with a certain string. It could for instance be set to only include feed items that have been written by a specific author or that have been tagged with a certain keyword.

A new RSS feed link will be created that contains only those items that have passed the filter. Users who need more options to filter and customize feeds should take a look at Yahoo Pipes instead.