[samikc]

Agree to what you say. Facebook is great in some cases, like finding your old buddy from college or school. I use FB to find them, but after that I get their email ids and from then on its email communication. So for me FB is the place to find people.

But FB is not for getting news about the topics I like; because, IMHO like the OP, Facebook news feed is broken for this purpose. Yes it is broken if you like to get news and information related to your interests. The prime reason, which I have discovered over the years of using FB, is I like things which my friends do not like a lot and vice-versa. I cannot blame Facebook for this. So when they like something which I do not, I still get the news in the feed. The same thing is happening in Twitter.

I felt that it would be better if we can follow information we like rather than the people we like. This way we will be able to get the information that we want/like rather than the noise. A critical step towards this is tags and if we can follow a tag it would be better [1].

[1] Disclaimer: I have created a website to do just that. Link is https://www.scoopspot.com/ .

[scholia]

I agree, but people have always followed the information they want.

Online, that's as old as Usenet, and it continued through topics on CompuServe and AOL. It continues today through specialised forums and bulletin boards, especially the forums on subject-based websites. Good ones include AV Forums, Hydrogen Audio, DPReview, Doom9 etc.

Anyone who thinks Facebook is, or is meant to be, a substitute for Doom9 is extremely dim.

A lot of Facebook is social grooming and phatic communication http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/phaticterm.htm

[kalleboo]

I think Facebook is getting into "follow information" as well. Recently I've started getting items in my newsfeed from pages I've never visited or liked, with the header "<page> posted about <topic from my profile>"