Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Blocking Status Updates from Facebook Apps

Facebook is useful for staying in touch with friends and getting an idea what people are up to. Unfortunately, many Facebook applications post status updates on behalf of their users. To avoid wading through piles of status updates from Pillow Fight or FarmVille or ... I enlisted the help of the Google Chrome extension AdThwart. That extension does a good job of blocking ads. You can also use it to block arbitrary HTML elements in a page by using CSS selectors. Here's how I block those verbose Facebook apps:
  • in AdThwart's configuration options, choose "Add your own filters"
  • Add: facebook.com##div[data-ft*="app_id"]
P.S. Blocking the offending application doesn't alone solve the problem. Blocking prevents invites but doesn't hide the auto-posted status updates.

1 comments:

TanookiTravis said...

This is awesome. It's too bad it doesn't block status updates but it will be nice to prevent the invites from coming.

I still don't know why Facebook doesn't allow that option somewhere, even buried deep in the options. I suppose they make money on adds and apps so I suppose that makes sense. Still, from a user standpoint it's very aggravating.