I’m willing to put up with a fair amount of behind-the-scenes nannying by a website in return for a clean, easy-to-use interface. Thus my reluctant acceptance of the way Facebook mysteriously feeds me way too much info from Kevin and prevents me from seeing the updates posted by Eloise.
Turns out the real nanny deciding which friends I should play with is something called EdgeRank, which manages this convoluted process for Facebook.
In this excellent article on lockergnome.com, Kelly Clay explains the EdgeRank system in detail.