The applications and requests wouldn’t be quite as annoying if they weren’t this seemingly unending onslaught of gratuitous chatter. IMHO! =)

I’ve had a number of people ask me how to block these things, so here’s what I do. I can’t confirm completely that it will work 100% of the time, but there’s still a little bit of joy in telling everything to go away.

When you’re looking at your general news feed on your Facebook homepage, just hover over the top-right corner of the update you’d like to ignore in the future. When your mouse is over it you’re presented with a little menu item that gives you two choices:

1. Hide [Facebook username]: This hides all updates from this specific user. This probably isn’t what you want as it will block ANY updates from this person from showing in your news feed. Although that may still come in handy for those people you don’t want to “unfriend” but just want to ignore most of the time.
2. Hide [Facebook App Name]: This should hid any future updates from this app displaying in your news feed in the future. The problem with the Facebook platform though is that it’s very easy for people to write similar apps and rename them to do something else. I say keep blocking them, perhaps people will stop writing them if more and more of us ignore them.

For me, this stuff is like spam and should just be ignored. Hopefully this helps. If you’re not aware, you can also block all of those different “requests” you get from people too. When you click open the link to view the request’s details, there’s a little link option to “Block Application”. This should block all requests from this application to you in the future as well.

I’d love to hear any tricks you may have to streamline your Facebook usage. Let me know in the comments.

Image: Snagit of Facebook news feed

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Block Those Annoying Facebook Apps

There are a few limitations or annoyances if you’re not a paid user. You need to wait a certain amount of time before downloading (usually less than 2 minutes), you can’t download more than one file at a time and the zinger is that you need to fill out a CAPTCHA in order to download files.

CAPTCHAs are not usually a bad thing except when you can’t read it! RapidShare requires you to choose the graphics that contain a cat but they are both difficult to read and worse off, not everyone knows what a cat looks like. It usually takes me two or three tries to download. I understand that they want to make it so that people need to make sure they’re human before they can download but their CAPTCHA requires a user to be super-human. That’s not a good way to draw in more people.

Security is important but this type of security is ridiculous.

Post from: EveryJoe

How secure is too secure? Oh yeah, this is it.