Facebook continues to become a central point of most people’s online activities. The problem with using Facebook for so much stuff is that fighting through some of the challenges of Facebook like how to block those annoying Facebook apps means a larger percentage of your time in the day is wasted.
What we need is a way to tune our Facebook page so we really only see WHAT and WHO is important to us in our wall stream. The Facebook user interface has changed a little bit since I wrote about this little tip awhile back, so here’s an update.
Everything that’s posted on your wall by somebody else has a little set of hidden controls that will allow you to hide future updates of that type or from that person to ever appear on your wall again.
If you hover over the far, right-hand side of the update area a little, blue box with an “X” in it will appear. You’ll have at least the following options:
- Hide this post
- Hide all by [friend]
- Hide all by [selected apps]
This gives you a quick way to do this wall tuning I mentioned above.
The first option just lets you hide this individual update. Maybe it’s something you just don’t want to see on your wall or don’t want your other friends to be confronted with if they’re looking at your wall too.
Or, you have a friend that you don’t want to unfriend, but their updates are either too frequent, too political, too spammy, etc. You can hide all the updates from that specific person from appearing on your wall.
Or, and here’s the powerful one, you’re tired of seeing all those Farmtown requests, Foursquare check-ins or quizzes on your wall. If you use this last option you’ll keep ALL posts from that update off of your wall, regardless of what friend is generating them.
There you go!
After a few days of tuning your Facebook Wall, you’ll start to really be able to focus in on all those updates you’re really interested in and stop seeing all the noise that just annoys you (You’re welcome Lark!).