So I use Facebook as a way to keep in contact with friends from back home, as well as family members. But lately, Facebook has been sucking significantly due to it's "Applications" crap. Now, I like add-ons as much as the next person, so long as I can ignore them (which is something I do vehemently with FB). However, now the applications my *friends* install start showing up on my news feed. That's all well and fine, except I really don't care which friend won what movie trivia challenge, etc. I want my news feed to be nice and clean -- show me things I care about like status updates, new notes, etc.
Facebook recently had a good idea, which they promptly screwed the pooch on while implementing it. They allowed me to "hide" things on my news feed which I wasn't interested in. This would be awesome, except the items weren't actually hidden. Instead, they were greyed out, made smaller, but still there. And they were really distracting! Here's an example of what my news feed looked like:
All of the items that are slightly disabled looking are ones which I had selected to hide. Notice how frickin many of them there are, and how difficult it makes the page to read (ignoring the redactions).
So I found an awesome FireFox extension called Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper, which is an Adblock Plus add-on that allows you to easily select elements of the page to hide. After installing it, I grabbed the element for the "hidden" news feed stories, and told AdBlock Plus to hide everything with that particular tag (note: you don't want to hide just the single story -- you want to hide them all, so I unchecked the "id" box, and checked the "class" box instead), like this:
Having done that, my Facebook news feed is significantly prettier:
It no longer has all that stupid Application crap in it, yay! Hopefully Facebook will implement my suggestion to have a news feed preference for Applications like they already do for other things (like Notes, Status Updated, etc). But until then, this awesome AdBlock Plus extension will certainly work. It has the extra-added benefit of allowing me to remove other annoyances, like the targeted ads I don't want to see. ;-)
I know I sound like I work for the people who made Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper, but I'm not. I'm just a very, very happy camper with these Firefox extensions. They really rock!
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