One of the biggest gripes I hear or read from people about Facebook is seeing all this stuff that they don’t want to see. Political arguments, religious arguments, lots of other weird stuff that they just don’t want popping up in their stream. The problem is that people are people, and you never know what type of thing someone is going to be putting up that’ll pop up out of nowhere and drive you crazy.
Do I have a solution? Of course I do, but I only know that it works for Firefox.
 |
It’s called F.B. Purity, and what it allows you to do is customize what your Facebook page looks like and a lot of what you’ll see. If you click on the image a couple of times until it’s larger you’ll see what I’m talking about. Actually, look at the image as it is; that’s the color of my Facebook page on my laptop. On my home computer the background is red.
Yes, you can change colors, fonts and font size. You can eliminate right or left sidebars if you wish, or you can pick and choose which of those boxes you don’t want to see on either side. For instance, I’m blocking sponsored stories, gifts, chat and chat box, game & app stories, and a host of other things. Do you want to see when people aren’t connected with you anymore? You have that as a choice also.
If you see the big image you’ll see that you have choices on the left side of the program where you can customize things you’re going to get anyway, such as do you want to see your news feed in real time or in the way Facebook gives it to you, deciding what it feels is more important to you? Do you want to eliminate certain types of stories from showing up in your stream? You can modify that.
The big one for me is the box on the right where you can type in words you don’t want to show up in your stream. This works very well unless the words are in an image; nothing you can do about that unless you decide to type in the name of the site the person who shared it got it from. You can see some of the words I don’t want popping up in my stream; keeps me from getting mad and wanting to verbally attack people most of the time. lol My problem is that I don’t use bad language and that includes ever writing it, thus I haven’t been able to bring myself to type those words in so I won’t see them anymore. Maybe I should think about cutting and pasting. 🙂
As I said, it’s an add-on that works with Firefox, and it possibly works with Chrome as well, maybe even Opera; I don’t know. However, you have to add it independently, as you can’t go through the normal way of adding it. You can go to the F.B. Purity site and download it from there.
If you decide to download it, I want to tell you that they put the date in wrong for when the last update was. It was January 2014; they typed in 2013 by mistake. If you care take a look; I love it & highly recommend it.; oh yeah, it’s free! And Facebook hates that people use it because they feel we should just be subjected to a lot of nonsense; another good reason for using it. 😉
It works for Chrome Mitch because I use it and have for probably over a year now.
Like you when I hear people gripe about stuff I just shake my head because I wrote about it myself awhile back. I love this little invention and I love it when people get on a tear about stuff. I just go in and blacklist certain words and I never see anything regarding that again. Gosh I love this extension.
I never have to look at ads either so it really does a lot.
Great share and it not only works for Chrome but also Safari, Opera and Maxthon. Tada!!!
~Adrienne
See there, I knew someone would know about it for other browsers. lol I’ve been using it for more than a year also, and I was really glad to have it during the presidential election cycle in 2012. I’m thinking I might need to have one of my friends come over to add the curse words. lol
Looks very interesting and I think that I am going to test it. Have to admit that I don’t want to see anything related to religion, politics and Justin Bieber.
Carl, I’d almost forgotten about the Biebs until you mentioned his name. I don’t see stuff about him often, but I probably should think about blocking his name from coming up one of these days. The program works great; let me know how you like it.
Hi Mitch,
Honestly, its so annoying seeing so many things you don’t like popping on your Facebook stream.
To this effect, I had to even blocked some of my friends, and yet its tough.
Thanks Mitch for sharing this tool, I have never heard of it before.
James
No problem James. It works wonders and I like the customization. I hope you enjoy it.
Hahaha, loved the last bit 😉
I have used it in the past (I was hoping for FB to adapt those features into their own system, but now I know that would never happen. FB is more concerned about making money, than providing a friendly experience to their users).
Anyways, I use interest lists to manage my FB activities (so, I don’t ‘use’ the timeline). I have interest lists for bloggers, for comics (I am huge comics fan :D) and so forth. Not only does it help to avoid all the crap, but also keep myself organized (and limit the time I spent on each).
I don’t want to spend too much time checking out comics news. Spending a bit more time with the bloggers list, on the other hand, is great 😀
Anyways, thank you for sharing this, Mitch!
Appreciate it 🙂
First Jeevan, you didn’t end up in spam! lol
Second, lists can take care of a lot of that, and I probably need to put more of my lists together so I won’t miss things from specific people, like I’ve worked on doing with G+. Still, sometimes even people you want to follow will throw out some stuff you don’t want to see, so FB Purity still gets the job done.
“Facebook hates that people use it because they feel we should just be subjected to a lot of nonsense; another good reason for using it.” Is this the same Mitch who was afraid to tick off the Facebook gods by associating with ME, yesterday? Hahahaha!! Isn’t “Facebook Purity” an oxymoron?
I wasn’t afraid of Facebook and your association; I was afraid of putting your link condemning them on their site; much different thing. lol Actually, it would be an oxymoron if Facebook was saying it but since it’s someone else’s creation and I’ve been pretty happy with it… nope! lol
Nice post :). I am going to test it because I want to avoid any celebrity gossip news. It is very irritating to unwanted content on your facebook screen. I blocked some pages due to same reason.
Good luck with it. I don’t mind the celebrity stuff but all this political stuff… ugh!