I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately trying to get rid of all the quizzes that have been hitting my Facebook pages from people. I’ve blogged about one way to get rid of them, which has been working well for me, but today I got another suggestion on how to ban them from even displaying on my page in the first place.

You can follow the instructions below that were given to me by Papa Roux on Facebook. He operates a cajun restaurant here in Indianapolis, but he’s serving up more than great food with this tip.

If it’s not enough reason jus because they’re annoying, here’s an article from PC World about the other reason these quizzes are doing more than just giving you a bit of an insight to your friends on Facebook. There is a cost with The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes.

What he shares isn’t too complex but it’s also not as immediately obvious as you would expect either.

If you look at your Facebook homepage you’ll see sets of small buttons that are the different types of updates you’ll see in your updates main page.

On the left-hand side you’ll see something similar to what appears on my sidebar. I’ve got a lot of groups specified, but you get the idea.

Just click and drag the items to the top of the list you are most interested in seeing in your stream. I prefer Status Updates, and photos and Links.

My least preferred item at the moment are all those quizzes, which appear as part of the news feed updates. I’ve moved this to the bottom of my list. So far it’s helped bury those quizzes out of view even more.

If you’ve got more tips on how to get rid of what you don’t want on you Facebook stream, be sure and let us know in the comments.

There’s an area of Facebook that I believe really needs to be addressed for a variety of reasons. As you begin finding old friends from high school, connecting with extended family members as they begin using Facebook, and maybe even start connecting with clients and co-workers, there’s an issue of who gets notified of your updates when you have them.

If you imagine all the different groups of your contacts as an extending circle of influence similar to what would be shown in the image below.

Facebook Circles of Contacts

Let’s think about your closest friends or family being the center circle, and extend from there the groups of people you have less contact or influence with in your personal life.

You may want to send an update to your friends and family, that’s not seen or available to your old high school friends, or perhaps more importantly those clients and co-workers that you’ve found on Facebook.

As far as I know, there’s no way to accomplish this currently on Facebook. In some instances your circles may not nicely overlap.

It’s this occasion where I think you should have the ability uncheck different groups of your friends to not be informed of an update or be able to see it as visible. By default all of your updates would go to everyone as the functionality exists now.

But on those occasions where you would like to exclude certain groups, you could uncheck their group for being included in the update. Also, if an update was marked private in one of these instances, any response by that group of friends would also only be viewable by the people you’ve identified as being able to see that update. So someone’s response to your “private” update should not appear on their wall.