Reducing The Noise With The Facebook Feed Filter For Firefox

Johan — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:07:38 +0000

I would be exaggerating when I say that I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook; a mix of curiosity, boredom and irritation describes my feelings towards it much better.

Facebook & Me

In September 2007 I created a Facebook account because it seemed to be the next big thing and everyone had one. I looked around for a while, discovered that no one I knew had an account, didn’t find a use for it, and quickly forgot all about it.
A year later I logged in again deciding to give it another try, which I did for a couple of months, until I got bored, which was followed by half a year of inactivity.
Late Summer of 2009 I logged in again encouraged by members of the online ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) community and have been active ever since. In half a year the number of friends has increased fivefold, but to be honest I have no idea who most of them are.
Early on I made the decision not to spend waste time playing games on Facebook and to limit the number of applications to Goodreads Books, NetworkedBlogs, and Causes. No snowball fights, no horoscope, no hearts, no hugs, …, and certainly no sucking of lollipops.
Yet when I look at my Facebook page, on average once a day, I have to wade through a seemingly endless amount of messages like person A has become friends with person B, horoscopes, hearts, person C joined group D, hugs and sucked lollipops. If people enjoy using those applications, that’s fine by me, but I have decided not to use them and still get all those messages. There is useful information in my feed, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just horrible.
I considered deactivating my Facebook account or unfriending everyone and start over again, when I saw an article on committing virtual suicide. I couldn’t help laughing. I just love the creativity of people on the internet.

Committing Virtual Suicide

Committing virtual suicide, aka social network suicide, is a way to remove yourself from social media like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or LinkedIn! unfriending everyone and deleting all your messages in the process. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is the work of a group of artists, designers and programmers based in the Netherlands who wanted to create a way to let people destroy their social networking accounts.
As lots of people post stuff on social media they might regret later this free service is priceless because deactivating your Facebook account doesn’t remove your data.
Anyway, I didn’t want to take such a drastic step yet, so I started looking for a way to filter my news feed.

Feed Filter

Feed Filter, previously know as Facebook Filter, is an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It’s purpose is to filter out some types of messages from your Facebook News Feed.
Feed Filter is as easy to install as any other Firefox add-on; all it takes are some clicks. The add-on is under active development so if you want the latest version you can install it from the site of the developers.
As you can see on the screenshot below there a quite a lot of settings to play with. When you check the option “Highlight items above in yellow instead of hiding” you will be able to see the effects of the selected filters. The messages that normally would be hidden are now displayed with a yellow background. Once you have configured Feed Filter to your liking you can uncheck the option.
Gone are all the messages like “is now friends with”, “joined the group”, “became a fan of”, …
Gone are all the messages from applications like Farmville, Anita predictions, Daily Horoscope, iHeart, Suck My Lollipop, Zoo World, Fortune Cookie, …
The applications that are white listed by me are Goodreads Books, NetworkedBlogs, and Causes.

Still not a fan

Even after using Feed Filter for some weeks now I am still not a fan of Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook and lots of people are enjoying themselves on it, but I don’t feel like sharing (a lot) of my personal life with people I hardly know and on a site I do not trust. Unlike Google, Facebook hasn’t made the promise to do no evil.
I met some nice people on Facebook and discovered and received interesting news, but …

as a source for important news I prefer RSS feeds and Twitter over Facebook
as a means for communication I prefer email, Twitter, Yahoo! Messenger, and Google Talk over Facebook.

Thanks to Feed Filter I am going to give Facebook a second fourth try, but I guess it will turn out that I have just postponed committing virtual suicide.
Maybe I am just antisocial.

Resources

I’m not anti-social.
I’m just not social.