News Feed — the center column of your home page — is a constantly updating list of stories from people and Pages that you follow on Facebook.

In addition to posts from friends and Pages you follow, you’ll see photo tags, friend requests, event updates, group memberships and other activity.

The News Feed algorithm bases this on several factors, including: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update).

You might see posts in your News Feed from people you're not friends with if your friends liked or interact with that post. Note that we only show you someone's posts if they are set to Public (anyone) or Friends of Friends.

When you send a friend request to a person, public stories about them (stories that have the privacy set to "Everyone" may appear in your News Feed. This way you don’t have wait for them to respond to your friend request to see their public updates. Please note that News Feed will never show stories that a non-friend wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see. People who have yet to accept your friend requests will also appear on the Friends page. Here, you can add them to Friend Lists.

If you don’t want to see stories from a person who has yet to accept your friend requests, you can hide them from your News Feed by placing your cursor to the right of a story about them and clicking the "Hide" link that appears. Alternatively, you can remove them as a friend by clicking the "X" next to their name on the Friends page.

When someone sends you a friend request, public stories about you (i.e., stories that have the privacy set to "Everyone") may appear in their News Feed. If you decline a friend request from this person, stories about you will not appear in their News Feed anymore.

News Feed will never show stories that a non-friend wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see. For example, if you posted a video and set the privacy to "Friends," a person who is waiting for you to approve their friend request would not see that in their News Feed. If you had set the video to be visible to Everyone, that person would see it.

You can always change your privacy settings by selecting "Privacy Settings" under the Settings drop-down menu and clicking the appropriate section.

When a friend posts on your Wall (timeline), your mutual friends will see a story in their News Feeds.

For example, if Dave is friends with both John and Julia, he will see a story in his News Feed when John writes on Julia's Wall (timeline).

When you become friends with someone on Facebook shortly after an event you both said you attended, the event may be mentioned as part of the friendship story that displays on your profile (timeline) and in News Feed. You’ll be able to see how you met this friend when you view your friendship page in the future.

If you do not want the event to display as part of the story, you or your friend can remove it by going to the friendship page. You can access this page using the "See Friendship" link on your friend’s profile (timeline). Clicking the "x" next to "Met after (event)" at the top of the page will remove this information from both the friendship page and Feed stories.

Keep in mind that you can also delete the full friendship story and any other Feed story by clicking the "x" next to the story.