I don’t have anything against mature, rational people who choose to spend their time playing Farmville or Mafia Wars.  Some of them are good online friends of mine.  I just don’t care to see their virtual game exploits, their advertising for get rich quick webinars, or their real estate listings in my Facebook home feed.

One of my favorite features in Facebook is the Remove button (formerly known as the Hide button).  You can hide your friends’ annoying, inappropriate, offensive or boring status updates from your home feed forever, without them knowing and without it effecting your friendship or other Facebook interactive functionality.

In your Home feed, just mouse over to the right of the offending entry; mousing over the remove button will make it  visible and clickable:

When you click, the entry goes away and is replaced by a bar that lets you choose to Hide, Mark as Spam, or Cancel.  If the entry is generated from an app, you also have the option of hiding the app, so that you never see updates from the app again.

Choosing Hide hides the person’s or app’s future updates.  And the cool part is the the hidee never knows they have been hidden from your feed.  If you have second thoughts about hiding your aunt’s Zodiac app, or you decide that maybe your Farmville playing buddy has something useful to say now and then, you can  UN-hide them by going to the bottom of your home page and finding and clicking the link Edit Options.  This will list all the friends, pages and apps you have hidden and let you re-instate them.

Have fun and check out my FB profile and my Memphis Page.