At a family dinner the other night, an uncle mentioned that he has grown tired of reading the mundane in his Facebook News Feed. I agreed that there are only so many times I can read about someone going to the grocery store or what someone”s plans are for dinner before I”m ready to un-friend them. On top of this, many of us Facebook users are bombarded by updates from Facebook Applications such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and any number of trivia games.
Fortunately, Facebook gives us some tools to filter updates we don”t want to see.
Login to your Facebook account and navigate to your News Feed page. Now I know there is at least one person you are friends with who just isn”t interesting on Facebook. Scroll down until you see an update from that person. As you roll your mouse over an update from that person, an “X” appears in the upper right corner of that update. Click this box.
Once you click the “X” a small menu will appear. You will have the option to “Hide this post,” “Hide all by…” and “Mark as spam.”
“Hide this post” will simply remove that one post from your News Feed.
“Hide all by…” will remove all posts by that friend from your News Feed. You can always re-add someone to your News Feed after you hide them, so don”t be afraid to do this.
“Mark as spam” should only be used to report gross misuse of Facebook.
When you hide a friend”s updates that friend will never know that you have done so. They simply will not appear in your News Feed. Though they will not appear in your Feed, they will still be able to send you a private message.
You can hide updates from Facebook applications such as Farmville by using a similar technique. Roll over a Farmville update in your News Feed and click the button in the upper right corner to hide that application.
If you ever want to re-add a Friend or an application you have previously hidden, scroll to the bottom of your News Feed and click the “Edit Options” link. Clicking this link will pop up a window that shows the friends and applications you have previously hidden from you feed. Simply click the “Add to News Feed” button to re-add that person or application to your feed.
For the worst of Facebook friends, you can un-friend them by visiting that person”s Facebook profile page and clicking “Remove from Friends” at the bottom of the left column. Again, they do not receive any notification if you remove them.
Peter Imes is publisher of The Dispatch. You can email him at [email protected].
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