I don't bother to log into Facebook as much as I used to, largely because it has become an incredibly irritating experience.
It's not that I suddenly hate or am jealous of my Facebook friends - far from it. It's because I find it difficult to find out what they're up to when all I can see are effectively adverts for Facebook games.
Mafia Wars, Farmville, Cafe World and so on and so forth - they all send out alerts and reports telling you when one of your friends has been playing, clogging up the screen and trying my patience.
My feed is full up of these meaningless messages, taking the place of stuff I actually want to see - photos of my friends and their families, many of whom I haven't seen in years, for example.
Oh no! Someone has lost a sheep. Hooray! They found it again! Give me a break.
What's more, it seems to be friends who I always considered to be busy people - surely they don't have the time to tend to these virtual farms all day long? I've got a better game you can play - it's called GET BACK TO WORK!
Facebook gives you the option to change many settings relating to notifications, but unfortunately not to turn off these pesky game updates (about which I really do not care - did I mention that?).
Until this changes, I'll be giving Facebook a miss for the sake of my sanity.
Comments
Latest comments
November 04 10:09
Kathy
Hi Ben
you can hide the news items you dont want to see very easily and this will save you from feeling so irritated lol! The next time you see a farmville or mafia post, go to the top right hand corner of that post and click on the little "hide" box that will appear when you hover in the right hand corner. It will drop down a menu that will give you 2 options, one to hide that friend completely and one to hide posts from farmville or what ever it was...... once you have clicked on this those annoying little posts will be NO MORE :-)))) there you go! Sorted lol!
November 04 10:48
Peter Wesson
Add it to the list of irratating features, the new live feed, that tells you when a friend has joined a group or messges deleted from your profile still showing up in live feed ....having said all that and I do so agree on the games updates it's still a good way to keep in touch with friends and family in spite of itself, so I'll stick with it.
November 04 13:36
Leonard Aye
It's very easy to turn off these annoying messages from ALL Facebook applications (not just these games).
If you hover your mouse over a particular message from a friend about, say Farmville, you'd see a little grey box called Hide on the top right of the message. Click on it and you can hide that friend of the application that generated the message.
Simple!
OK, you will have to do that for EACH facebook, application but still better than nothing, eh?
November 09 13:19
Peter Wesson
Anna, Kathy and Leonard, I spent a happy few minutes going through doing exactly as you suggested - thanks for the tip.
Peter