Remember back in heyday of TiVo when the Wall Street Journal ran the story my TiVo thinks I'm gay? Well, it seems I'm facing a similar dilemma with the news feed on my Facebook home. It has decided that Robert Scoble is the most important person in my social network. Here's a screen shot of what my news feed looked like when I logged into Facebook yesterday.

There are over a hundred people in my social network on Facebook, many tagged as coworkers, high school friends and family yet 50% of the content in my news feed is always about Robert Scoble. It would be understandable if he was the only one among my hundreds of "friends" actively using the site but that isn't the case. A quick glance at my status updates page reveals something quite astounding

Even though I've gotten status updates from about twenty people in my social network over the past day, the only person whose status updates Facebook decided are important enough to show on my home page when I log in is Robert Scoble. WTF?

Even crazier, guess who is on the list of people whose updates I've asked not to show up in my news feed unless nothing else is available?

I can only guess at why Facebook has decided to ignore my wishes and fill my news feed with content I've explicitly rejected. Perhaps their algorithms think he is my most important "friend" because he has thousands of people in his network? Perhaps they think his content will generate the most clickthroughs since they are usually videos? Either way, this is one instance where Facebook has failed to put the user in control.

If this hadn't become the primary way I keep up with a lot of folks I grew up with back in Nigeria, I'd quit using Facebook. Fricking...social lock-in.