According to the
Wall Street Journal, explained in an article written by Douglas Perry for
Tom's Guide, Facebook may remove the option to filter your news feeds. This would be bad news for Mafia Wars players as we would see posts from all applications that any of our Facebook friends uses.
Currently there are two ways to prevent seeing posts from applications you aren't interested in. You can hover your mouse in the upper right corner of the post until an X appears.
Click on it and select "Hide all by XXX".
To check on or edit the status of hidden applications, scroll to the bottom of your news feed and select "Edit Options". If you accidentally hide Mafia Wars, this is how to get it back on your news feeds.
You will get a window that lists all of your hidden applications. Click on the X located to the right of the application to unhide. You can see I have 55 hidden applications. I won't be too pleased if these all make it back into my news feedds.
If you could give a rat's ass about a application, there is an option to totally block it so players can't send you requests as well. There are two ways to block applications. From news feed posts, click on the link that takes you to the Facebook Application Page.
Scroll down the far left column of the page and click on "Block Application".
The second way to block an application is to do it from your Game Requests Page. Click on the X located to the far right of a application request.
Select "Block XXX?.
Click "Okay" to verify that you wish to block the application of choice.
To edit blocked applications, go to your Privacy Settings" from your Account Drop Bar. Look for your Bock Lists and select "Edit your lists". Scroll through the list to find the application you wish to unblock.
If Facebook does take away the ability to hide posts in the news feeds, hopefully the option to block them will remain. If not the news feed will become useless for searching (thank goodness for Team Spockholm). If we can no longer block application, there is a work around that won't be good for Mafia Wars players. The line that stood out most in the article reference above explains it all.
If the unfiltered news stream will, in fact, become a reality, there may only be one way to escape those Farmville chicken messages - you may have to use that unfriend button and trim your list of friends.
Just for fun, here is an image of my blocked applications list. I've kept it small to prevent too much scrolling. Imagine what my news feeds will look like with all of these applications back in action.
Thanks to FionaWG for the link to the article posted above.
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There is not even a positive reason for them to do this. They would gain nothing bit angry and annoyed consumers. However, it seems as though they get thrills from annoying us.
ReplyDeletethere is a filter for games in FB
ReplyDeleteon the left hand side, click "Game requests"
scroll down to Game stories
on the right hand side, click on the drop down menu and select Mafia Wars.
As if the feed isn't messy enough as it is. Ugh!
ReplyDeleteThere is a browser add-on called "Better Facebook" that can filter posts and even separate them into tabs based on application. This helps cut down the clutter a lot. The website is http://BetterFacebook.net, and their FB page is http://www.facebook.com/betterfb.
ReplyDeleteIt'll just increase the popularity of third party filtering apps such as the one at http://betterfacebook.net/
ReplyDeleteThere's a thought - a Spocklet that filters all but MW posts!
ReplyDelete