New tools will help you weed through the clutter of boring, unwanted information, often from long-forgotten acquaintances, and surface the gems from close friends and interesting pages.

You'll now be able to choose the friends and pages you want to see on your news feed first each time you log on.

We're always working to improve and personalize your News Feed experience,' said Facebook's Jacob Frantz in a blog post.

'We know that ultimately you're the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you and that is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see. 

'Last year we announced some new ways to control what you see in News Feed. 

'Today we are announcing even better tools for you to actively shape and improve the experience.

We've redesigned and expanded Facebook's News Feed Preferences to give you more control.'

To use the service, users go to the friend's profile.

 

Click on the box that says 'following' and select 'see first.'

Facebook's computer software uses a wide range of information you provide to decide what to show. 

This includes what friends you interact with and how often, or whether you tend to like photos, videos or text updates more.

In announcing the new tools Thursday, Facebook acknowledged that its automated system isn't perfect, so it wants to give users a way to set their own preferences.

In addition to selecting who or what page you will see first, you'll still to be able to 'unfollow' friends so you won't see them at all. 

This option has been available before to people who don't want to take drastic step of unfriending someone but would rather not read about their lives.

For the rest, though, Facebook will continue to use its software to choose what to show you. 

So unless you want to see someone's posts all the time or not at all, you're stuck with what you've got.

It also offers an overview each week.

'With an updated design of the tools we previously launched, you can now see a list of the top people, Pages and groups that you’ve seen in your News Feed over the past week, and choose to unfollow any friend, Page or group if you don’t want to see their updates. 

You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and choose to re-follow them at any time.' 

(dailymail.co.uk)