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March 16, 2009
De-crufting the new Facebook with Adblock Plus
Like a lot of people, I'm not all that impressed with the new Facebook. It's like a half-baked clone of both Twitter and FriendFeed.
The new "Highlights" column that appears on the right-hand side of your home page is particularly-poorly thought-out, presenting a mish-mash of items that your friends have interacted with and presenting applications that they've used. Not what they've done with the applications - just the applications themselves. This is largely useless. It also has an advertisement stuck right in the middle of it.
April post update: As if that wasn't bad enough, they've started treating "Pages" (the little mini-websites you can create in Facebook for people, places or things and to become a "fan" of - quite a good idea until now) as people, and they now appear in a "People You May Know" box. In addition to being wrongly titled, this is sheer noise - 99.9% totally irrelevant. It will be worse and worse as your friend list increases, as it's sourced from your friends' "fan" affiliations.
Thankfully, the marvellous Adblock Plus extension for Firefox allows you to hide page elements based on their style identities, so here are some filter rules I cooked up. To apply them, open your Adblock Plus preferences and choose "Add Filter" from the "Filter" menu, then paste in the code snippet of your choice.
- Remove the advertisement from the Highlights column:
#*(id^=highlights_ad)- Remove the contents of the Highlights column altogether:
#*(class^=UIHotStream)- Remove the "People You May Know" box:
#*(id^=pymk_hp_box)- Remove the "Connect With Friends" box (how many times are you gonna need it?):
#*(class^=UIConnectWithFriends)- Remove the rounded corners from all the user icons (I think they're ugly):
|http://www.facebook.com/images/ui/UIRoundedImage.png
Posted by hex at 7:47 PM in: Adblock Plus, Facebook, howto
