No offense meant to anyone who plays games on Facebook, but there are many of us who feel bombarded by the endless stream of Mafia Wars and Texas Hold ‘Em invites .
Today I’d like to share the easy way to get bothersome notifications out of your hair with only a click or two. That way if you don’t want to play you can opt out of seeing them when reading your wall. I’ll also show a quick way to block apps completely when invited.
Off The Wall: When you look at a Wall post, like the YoVille one pictured below, there is a small pull down menu in the upper left corner. See it? It says “Hide.”
When you pull down the menu it will offer you the option of hiding the person or hiding the app. Whichever one you choose will no longer show up on your wall. The fact that it works on people as well can be useful sometimes. You can preserve your friends status with someone but not be bombarded by their compulsive forwards (you know the type, the folks who post every fifteen minutes or so).
Stop It At The Source: Now this only removes the notifications from your Wall, it does not block invitations. What about those pesky invites you get every day? What about completely blocking an application? Look closely at the next invite you get.
If you look to the left underneath the blue Add button you will see Block This Application underneath it. If you never want to see that game or app again just click it.
When you do so the following pop up window will appear:
That pretty much sums it up. Click block and you’ll have stopped all of it at the source.
We all have different ways we use the Internet and social media, controls like these allows to do so with control over our experience.
Personally I block most of the games, simply because I don’t play them. (Well, okay, I play Zombies you caught me. That’s the only one though.)
I decided to write this post after have several people expressed surprise and pleasure when I showed them how easy it is. If you find it useful please share it with others!
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Unfortunately it seems that companies are blocking Facebook at work. http://blog.cyclope-series.com/2009/10/study-54-of-companies-ban-social-networks-at-work/
I find most of the game apps a frustrating waste of time. They seem to consume rather that create. I find myself especially put-off by the “by and sell your friends as pets” sort of thing.
Raging between the social and anti-social me, David
@Anelly It is still pretty common to find social and content filters in place when on a work computer.
@David Hence the importance of being able to opt out of the aspects that do not appeal to you. Happy app blocking!
Agreed. The hide function is one of my favorite features on Facebook, and I kind of wish Twitter would allow me to hide certain things (such as #oneletteroffmovies or updates from good friends who I’d never unfollow, but who tweet incessantly; as in, they have more than 20,000 tweets).
Do you happen to know if there’s a way to hide certain things from a person OTHER than their activity within an app? I’d like to be able to hide my friends’ status updates (specifically, the people who sync FB status with their twitter feed), but still see their event RSVPs, photo tags and comments, and so forth.
If it’s not available now, perhaps a future update from FB will include this option. Fingers crossed!
Thanks for sharing this article!
As far as I know that sort of granular control is not available. We can but hope…