Feeling bombarded by email messages whenever you post an update or leave a comment on Facebook? Well, relief may be on the way in the form of a new feature that replaces all those pesky notifications with a regular, less intrusive summary.
The feature is still undergoing testing, according to TheWebCrunch—and indeed, I don’t see the option listed on my own Facebook account settings yet.
Here’s what Facebook has to say about the new setting:
We’re testing a feature for people who are very active on Facebook and receive lots of email notifications from us. We’ll provide a new summary email and turn off most individual email notifications. If you want to turn them back on, there’s a control in your account settings.
As it stands now, Facebook will send you email notifications for dozens of individual events, including someone adding you as a friend, a post on your Facebook wall, or a “poke.”
Personally, I don’t mind getting a notification when a fellow Facebooker tries to tag me in a photo or adds me to a group—provided it doesn’t happen too often, that is.
But if you post a “congrats!” comment to a friend’s pictures of, say, an adorable newborn, expect to get notifications for each and every follow-up “so cute!” or “beautiful little girl!”—and if your friend is popular on Facebook, you could be in for an avalanche of email.
Of course, you can always edit the email settings for specific types of events in your Facebook account, but the options consist of “on” or “off,” and you can’t turn off notifications for a particular comment thread. (Now that’s a feature I’d sign up for.)
How often would these new Facebook notifications digests arrive, and when will the feature go live for everyone? Good questions—and unfortunately, still no answers.
So, what do you think: would you prefer to get a summary message for all your Facebook notifications, or would you rather get them one at a time, as they happen?
Thanks for the tip, Prachi!
