March 2006

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Facebook has given me pretty much what I wanted. The new homepage feels a lot like the old Live Feed, without so much information I didn't want to see, thanks in large part to the ability to more closely filter the types of information shown.

At the same time, I think the page is a little cluttered, mainly by the addition of the Highlights section. I appreciate that some people might think that's the best thing since chocolate, but to me it was distracting.

Mercifully, some generous person good at writing scripts disliked it, too, and made a Greasemonkey script for Firefox users that makes Highlights disappear. It also makes several other appearance changes, described in the description on the download page, which is here.

For the whole day I had the new Facebook before I got the script, I was filtering Highlights out using Aardvark, a Firefox add-on that blanks out parts of pages for the time you're there. (It's also useful if you're on a message board and someone has posted something so large it breaks a table.

I was actually looking for something else on Greasemonkey when I ran across the above-mentioned script. I had done a search for ways that would allow filtering certain folks off a Twitter stream without unfollowing them. Let's just say that I love college basketball, too, but damned if I want a timeline that's nothing but play-by-play, which came painfully close to happening yesterday when Carolina was playing Florida State.

And lo, such a temporary filter does exist. I've spent part of this morning testing it, with two of my followees blocked, but as soon as I restarted the browser they were back. And not to worry, neither was really ignored; the filter doesn't block them on TwitterFox, just the main web page.