I know people have been using similar techniques with flashlights, sparklers, etc. But the form-factor of an aerosol can makes this perfect for traditional graffiti artists. It even offers interchangeable tips.

(Via Cool Hunting and @nickvegas)

For the most part, this looks like a decent redesign. However, two things that might get on my nerves:

Stream

The stream shows you all posts from your friends in real-time. This keeps you up to date on everything that’s happening. You can control who appears here.

I’m glad I can control what’s there, but I don’t want to see everything my friends are doing in real time. This is called a fire hose. I hope I can still control what types of posts show up.

Highlights

Featured photos, events, notes and more that you don’t want to miss. Stories are chosen based on what your friends have interacted with.

Notice the ‘featured’ part. I can almost guarantee that means ’sponsored.’¹ Great, so if some people on my friends list decide they like some shitty band, I’m going to get ads highlights about it. Why not base it on what I interact with?

Lastly, it pretty much goes without saying that FB Duct Tape will no longer work on this page.

1. And if not, how does something my friends post get chosen to be ‘featured?’

Print ad for Helvetica from 1966.

[via Daring Fireball & blog.conigs]

What I wanted to hide and why:

• “People You May Know” — Lately, this has turned into “People you probably don’t know, but were have the same town and are 10-12 years younger than you!” and “People who live in the same city!”
• Invite Friends — I’m not going to bug people to join Facebook.
• Find Friends — I don’t want to import my IM and Gmail address book.
• Maybe sponsors and ads? — This is really a maybe. At first, I really wanted to block them, but then ads for Threadless started showing up. For now, I’ve just taken to “thumbing down” ads that I have no interest in.

When all was said and done, I had a much cleaner interface:

How I did it

Since I already had Adblock installed, I figured I would start there. The nice thing about Adblock now is that it can block based on CSS selectors. Now, you don’t need to know what that means, only how it works. In Facebook, for example, the “People You May Know” section is labeled as “pymk” in the source code (div.pymk) and the “Find Friends” is identified as, oddly enough, “findfriends” (div#findfriends)¹.

You may be saying “so great, but how do how do I block them?” Well, here’s how: Open up your Adblock filters. Here’s what I currently use (which you can download as an Adblock Filterset, which also includes blocking the beacon):

• ##div.pymk
• ##div.invitefriends
• ##div#findfriends
• ##div.adcolumn (if you really want to block ads)
• ##div#home_sponsor (because most of the time, it’s just a Facebook ad)

If there’s something else you want to block on the page, get ready to get your hands dirty. Goto View:Page Source, then do a search for the text in or near what you want to block. You should see something that looks like<div id=”somethingorother”>. Great, that “somethingorother” is what you need. Since this is an ID, we’d use this format in our filter: “##div#somethingorother”. If it was instead <div class=”somethingorother”> it would be “##div.somethingorother”.

But sometimes Facebook can try to confuse you.  For example, the “People you may know” section actually had two classes, “sidebar_item” and “pymk.” In this case, it was easy to figure out which one to use. (Had I used “sidebar_item,” I would have blocked other things, too.

Now, this might not be worth the hastle for you. That’s fine. There’s other ways. If you have the Stylish plugin (mentioned yesterday) for Firefox, there’a a whole page of easy-to-install scripts that can take care of some of this for you or even change the layout/style of Facebook. Just beware, many of those scrips are outdated and probably won’t work now. Though there is one that caught my eye: Cleanup Facebook. It might do too much for you though, it looks like it hides any non-default app boxes & news feed items as well as ads.

1. The reason the first uses a period and the second uses pound/hash is the first is a class and the second is an ID. This isn’t a technical write-up so I won’t go into too much detail about CSS other than that.

[screenshot by fimoculous]