Unrefined Awesome

Note: These tips are for an older version of Facebook and may not apply after 10 February 2010.  I have however posted the first in a brief series of updated tips here.

Facebook can be a great way to connect with people and keep in touch. However, by default Facebook generates a lot of notifications, both via it’s own interface and by email, often about a lot of things you might not care about. There are however a few things you can do to manage and reduce the traffic so that you see less of the junk, and hopefully more of what interests you. If you have a couple of spare minutes and would like to try removing a lot of the annoyances that come along with Facebook you might consider some or all of the following simple suggestions:

1.  Filter your news feed to show status updates only.

The news feed is what you see by default on your Facebook homepage when logged in.  It contains status updates, recently posted photos or links, new notes and a wide assortment of traffic generated by Facebook applications your friends use.  Many people would prefer to see less of the other (sometimes annoying, particularly in the case of some applications) content and just see status updates in this section, and it’s quite easy to do so.

In the upper right of your homepage you should see a list of filters, marked in red in the screenshot below.  Clicking on one of these will temporarily show you just the type of content listed, with the default “news feed” showing a mixture of everything.

You can however also drag & drop these filters into a different order, and by moving “status updates” to the top you will by default only see status updates on your homepage.  Note that this means you will no longer see your friends newly posted photos on your homepage.

2.  Filter your news feed to show updates only from people you choose.

Many people have a lot of friends on Facebook, and whilst you might not want to go as far as “unfriending” some of them there are probably people that generate a lot of news items you don’t really want to see.  A potential solution?  Using the same filters described above in suggestion #1, you can actually choose to see updates only from people and pages included in a list of your choosing.  How is it done?

Click “more” at the bottom of the list of filters, and then choose the option at the bottom to “create new list”.  Give your new list a name and choose the friends and pages you want to see updates from, then once you’re done, drag the new list to the top of your list of filters as in suggestion #1.  You’ll now see all types of updates on your homepage, but only from people or pages included in your list.  If you use this suggestion don’t forget to include newly added friends in your list; it won’t be done automatically, and you won’t see updates from them otherwise.

3.  Turn off email notifications.

With it’s out-of-the-box settings Facebook generates a lotof emails telling you about activity on the site.  Some people like to receive these, but, if like me you would rather turn all or most of them off, Facebook provides a simple way of doing so.

Click “settings” (1) on the top navigation bar of the site, and then choose “notifications” (2).  You’ll see a long list of checkboxes (3) which control exactly which occurances will generate an email.  Most people will be quite comfortable with turning almost all of these off; I personally only recieve emails if details of an event I am attending have changed.

4.  Ignore all invites from problem friends.

Some friends just send invites for an endless stream of things you aren’t interested in.  The simple solution to this, once you’ve identified such as person is to wait till your next invite from them, and choosing the option to “ignore all invites from <friend>” rather than simply ignoring the single invite.  Presto, you’ll never see that type of junk from that particular friend again!

5.  Block annoying applications.

In the same vein as suggestion #4, there are some applications that generate loads of annoying news stories and notifications, and if you’re not a user of the application you probably don’t want to see them; don’t just “ignore invitation” next time you see these applications, there’s also an option there to block all updates, and (with the exception of some quizzes, covered below) you should never be bothered by that particular application again.

6.  Quizzes.

Lastly, those damned quizzes.  If you’ve followed suggestions #1 or #2 above these might already be handled, but if not you’ll find many of them just keep popping up in spite of blocking application as in suggestion #5.  If you’re using a compatible web-browser (should work in FireFox and Opera, possibly other browsers) however, you should be able to get rid of the majority of these with this user script.

By following some or all of the above suggestions you should be able to reduce notifications to a more manageable level of things you actually care about.  All of the suggestions (excepting perhaps the slightly more technical userscript of #6) are pretty simple but may not be immediately obvious if you haven’t gone looking for them - I hope this post is helpful to some people out there.