As those of us who spend our days on the social network (for research purposes, naturally) know, there are two ways to view your News Feed on Facebook: sorted by "top stories" and by "most recent." You switch from one to the other via a menu at the top of your feed.

Many of us assume that "most recent" means you get posts from your friends unfiltered, without Facebook's algorithm determining what's a "top story." In fact, even "most recent" is filtered for your reading pleasure, based on whose stuff you've interacted with in the past.

So users are always interested in different ways of looking at their feed. One programmer stumbled across one on Monday — a URL that leads to a version of the news feed that many of us find to be less filtered than the alternative. But the link he found will vanish on Wednesday.

Scottish developer Tom Waddington found an apparently internal Facebook link for a completely unfiltered feed: https://www.facebook.com/?sk=nf_all. (Give it a try. We'll wait.)

How did he find it? "It was a lucky guess," Waddington told Mashable. "Obviously nf is newsfeed, and I tried tacking things on the end."

But Waddington also cautions that the link may not be working come Wednesday. That's when Facebook tends to push out its updated version of the site, which developers get to preview at beta.facebook.com every Sunday.

"It's in the process of being removed," says Waddington. "The beta site has it removed already. I'll see if there's still a way to get it to show!"

Here's what Facebook had to say in a statement: "It is an old link that allows you to access your News Feed operating on an earlier version of our ranking algorithm. This feed does not show all posts."

The company strenuously denied an earlier report in TechCrunch that incorrectly called it an "unfiltered version" of the feed.

Facebook did confirm, however, that the link will not function as of Wednesday. Check it out while you can.

What does your feed look like with this link? Would you want to have access to it going forward? Let us know in the comments.

UPDATE: Some users are reporting that Facebook has turned off the old link for them, two days' early. If what you're seeing is exactly the same as your regular news feed, that would be why.

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Ah, the news feed, Facebook's party central. Purveyor of addictive updates on friends and former acquaintances. And ground zero in the battle for what the social network was, is, and where it's going.

What shows up in that news feed, an interview with the relevant manager at Facebook reveals, is the result of an endless chess game of algorithmic amendments by the company trying to please its users — as well as endless rounds of complaints from those users.

Case in point: earlier this week, a programmer uncovered a Facebook URL that appeared to show your feed unfiltered, algorithm free, with all of your friends' updates in chronological order. That was news to Facebook, which has no idea where the page came from.

"That was not something that was ever live," News Feed Product Manager Will Cathcart told Mashable. "It was a mix of our current algorithms and an old approach. It was ranking by [interesting] friends, rather than by which posts were likely to be interesting.

"As soon as we heard about it, we turned it off."  Read more…

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