Cleaning up Facebook

Okay, so I’m slowly coming around to Facebook, luddite that I am. However, that doesn’t mean I like everything about it (though just for the record, the most recent redesign doesn’t bug me at all). For one thing, I find the vast majority of the applications on Facebook — e.g., quizzes, games — rather pointless, if not horribly annoying.

Even though we may be friends, I really couldn’t care less if you’ve just taken a quiz and made some huge self-discovery, such as the type of parenting method that you are, or if you’ve got a new high score on Bejeweled Blast.

Thankfully, Facebook allows you to hide these alerts. Go to your Facebook homepage and scroll down in your news feed until you come across one of those app alerts/announcements from one of your friends. Place your mouse in the upper-right corner of the alert and a little “Hide” button will appear. Click on the button and a menu will appear with two options: you can hide all alerts from that friend or just alerts from that application. (If you click on the “Hide” icon for a “regular” alert in your news feed, you’ll just have the option to hide that friend’s alerts.)

If you want to “un-hide” a person or an app, scroll down to the bottom of your news feed and click on the “Edit Options” link. This will launch a pop-up menu that lists all of the friends, public profiles, and applications that are currently hidden from your news feed. Click on the “Add To News Feed” button next to any items that you want to see back in your news feed and click on the “Close” button when you’re done.