Want to know how to get the old news feed back when you go to the home page? Here’s how in 3 easy steps:

1. Create a new friend list containing all your friends (or just the ones you care about).
2. Move that list to the top by selecting “More,” then dragging it up to the top of the list of… um… lists.
3. Profit!¹

I’ve been using something similar ever since Facebook introduced the live feed as the news feed last time they changed things. (Facebook is fickle, huh?) I have a list of people I really want to see up-to-date information for without getting bombarded by various people from grade school whom I haven’t seen in nearly 15 years but for some reason keep as friends on Facebook. (Sorry former classmates…) So it took me a while to notice the new change. Hopefully this helps.

1. Tired meme, I know… But still funny.

Facebook is a massively multiplayer online role playing game in which the objective is to collect ‘friends.’

[via swissmiss]

Take the typical blog (like this one you’re reading right now, fascinating, right?), newer posts are usually above older posts. So if you wish to read chronologically, you must read bottom-top. But for the most part, that’s not a big deal as you’re still reading a large block of information.

Where this backwards way of reading really gets annoying are services like Twitter and Facebook (and now comment threads on Gaweker sites like Lifehacker). In this situation you’re reading small snippets of information. If you’re only concerned with what’s happening right now, it’s not that big a deal. But if you want to read chronologically to get a sense of the larger conversation, it’s a down-right pain in the ass:

Reading an entire page like that is tiring. It’s downright backwards. So I pose this simple question: why don’t these services offer a chronological view? And even more, why don’t third-party applications like Twitterrific offer a chronological view?

Am I in the minority on this or does it just make sense?

It’s not even International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

[Man, this site is slowly turning into Facebook News, isn't it? Okay, no more Facebook posts for at least a couple days… I swear!]

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?’

1. Random Wikipedia article title is your band name.
2. Last four words of the last quote of these 10 random quotes is your album name.
3. The third picture on the last seven days page on Flickr is your album cover.

Mine worked out surprisingly well.

Photo credit: Photographer in Alberta.

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.

UPDATE 3 (03/04/2009): Facebook is updating their home page in the near future, though they don’t say when. I can almost guarantee that FB Duct Tape will no longer work once the new home page goes live.

Have you seen this video on “The 25 things I hate about Facebook?” The important bit is at 2:54…

After seeing that, I thought “It can be done.” So I did it. This is not a Photoshop™. This is now what I see when I log in to Facebook:

How’d I do it? You’ll need the Stylish Firefox extension, and this script I wrote. The huge chunk of characters is the image. That’s the only way I found to get Stylish to load a local image instead of using a server.

Now enjoy your still useless, but now duct-taped sidebar on Facebook..

(I’m fully aware this is just a simple CSS background image, and it’s entirely pointless, but so is Facebook. I just wanted to say “I can duct-tape over that crap in Facebook.”)

UPDATE: Script has been updated to duct tape over the ad-bar, too.

UPDATE 2: Even Julian loves the duct tape:

Dude – hahaha YOU are my hero. That is incredible. Totally sending that to my facebook list.
[...]
–Julian