Luke Carbis

Once a clean, fresh (if not so intuitive) MySpace alternative - now a spam ridden hell hole of useless applications. If you’re not met with a veritable plethora of applications each time you log in to Facebook, then you’re a minority. And if you don’t hit that damned ignore button at least 10 times a day - you might consider decalring Facebook bankrupsy, and creating a new account, to save yourself the hours of ignoring that are saved up waiting for you.

The question that came to mind yesterday is a question I’m sure many have pondered. Is it possible to take Facebook back to the “good-’ol-days” - before pirates, ninjas, warewolves, vampires, super-walls, scrabble, and any other application you could possibly be bothered to imagine?

The answer: Yes, and it’s not too hard. I like lists, here’s one to help you clean up your Facebook account.

1. Cull your Applications.

It took me a little while, sure, but removing all the third party applications you could manage without is guaranteed to leave you with a sense of Facebook zen. After my cull, I was just left with:

• Photos
• Video
• Notes
• Groups
• Events
• Marketplace
• Posted Items

You might decide to keep some more, but my general rule was only to keep applications developed by Facebook. No third party apps.

2. Start blocking

Whenever you receive an application request, there are two buttons. One to accept, and one to ignore. Just below these buttons is a link to Block This Application. From now on, instead of pressing Ignore whenever you get a new application request, choose to Block it instead. This will ensure that you don’t receive multiple requests for the same application, and you will see that the amount of application requests you receive will quickly dissapait.

3. Hide Notifications

Hit the Inbox drop down, then choose Notifications from the menu. From here, you can manage which applications you receive notifications from. Hide everything but the essentials (such as Photos or Wall Posts).

Already you will notice Facebook to be MUCH cleaner. But there are still a couple of things we can do to make it even more friendly.

4. Get rid of email notifications

If you’re like most people, you’re on Facebook at least once everyday. If that’s the case, you don’t need to get an email every time someone tags you in a photo, or writes on your wall - you’ll be notified by this when you log in. This is also a great way to reduce email clutter.

To stop the emails, hit the ‘account’ link, in the top right hand corner of the page. Then go to the Notifications tab. From here, you can choose to turn on or off every email notification. I turned every one of mine off.

5. Boost

If you’re a firefox user, you can take the Facebook clean-up one step further. By installing the Boost firefox extension, you can really customise your Facebook experience. I use this just to get rid of advertisments, and block all application requests altogther, but you can also customise the way you view photo albums, auto-refresh your home page, auto-login or even change the entire look and feel of Facebook. Boost also includes a Facebook toolbar (which I personally prefer to disable) for those hardcore Facebook users.

You can download the Boost extension here: Boost Firefox Extension.

That about wraps it up, but if you have any other tips or hints to help get a better experience out of Facebook, or if you even just found this post useful, let me know in the comments!

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