[How to] Filter out updates on Facebook News feed

Facebook is a social networking site as opposed to Twitter which to me is a broadcasting medium. But, Facebook has been widely used for broadcasting messages as well. Similar to the Twitter timeline, your Facebook news feed often gets flooded with updates carrying similar message. Facebook handles these cases to a greater extent than Twitter. Facebook tries to group messages based on the sender, application and other parameters (like events). If a person is spamming your news feed, you can hide the updates from that person. You can also hide the updates from a particular application. The only missing feature here is the ability to hide updates on a particular topic. That is where my script will be useful. It is an extension to the script written for Twitter.

Features

• Filter out topics. Filter out updates containing a set of words from your news feed (works on profile pages also). You can enter multiple words separated by a comma. This will prevent your news feed getting flooded with the similar updates.
• Filtered count Indicator. The filtered updates are not gone for ever. You can clear the filters to view them. The number of updates filtered out will be shown intuitively on the ‘Filters’ menu itself.
• Remember your settings. The script has the ability to remember your filter settings on the browser and will reload the same when you sign in again. Also, the script applies the filters on new incoming updates as well (with a max time lag of 15 secs).
• Hide the ‘Likes’ from friends. (v 1.2) If you don’t care about what your friends are liking on Facebook or on other sites, you can use this feature to hide the ‘Likes’ on your news feed.
• Hide the friend connection updates. (v 1.2) Whenever a friend of yours is connected to another person, Facebook will notify you about the new connection on your news feed. If you are not interested in knowing who has be-friended whom, you can disable the friend connection notification using this feature.
• Hide the attachments. (v 1.2) Enabling this option will hide all the attachments on your news feed. This includes shared videos, photos, links, etc.
• Hide Facebook Places. (v 1.3) Enabling this option will hide the check-ins from your friends.
• Hide Facebook Questions. (v 1.3)
• Hide Facebook Ticker Section. (v 1.4). Facebook added a new section called “Ticker” which shows all the activities of your friends. It pushes the information that are already available on your friends’ profile. This section adds too much of noise to your news feed. Use this option to fix the section.
• Show only the filtered posts. (v 1.4) Enabling this option will show the posts which match the search text specified. This will be handy if you want to know what friends say on a particular topic. Thanks to Raghu for the idea.
• Hide Unread Count. (v 1.5). Facebook added a new feature called “Smart Lists” and showed the lists on the news feeds page. The unread count of the lists / groups clutters the UI. Use this option to hide the unread count.

How to install?

Compatible Browsers: Firefox 3+, Chrome 4+

Firefox 3+

• Install the GreaseMonkey add-on for Firefox from here and restart the browser.
• Get the script by pointing your browser to this.
• GreaseMonkey Installation dialog box will appear. Please click on the “Install” button.
• You are all set to use the script. Refresh the Facebook homepage. ‘Filters’ menu will appear next to ‘Account’ menu.

Chrome 4+

• Chrome has native support for GreaseMonkey scripts. No additional extensions are needed to use the script.
• Get the script by pointing your browser to this.
• You will be prompted with a security alert. Please click on the ‘Continue’ button.
• The script will be installed as an extension. Refresh the Facebook homepage to see the ‘Filters’ menu.

The script might contain few minor UI glitches. Please let me know if you find any. If you feel some other feature is missing in Facebook, please reach out to me. I shall try to extend this script. If you are looking for a similar solution for Twitter, try this script. 

Update: A new version (v 1.2) is available with three new features – Hide the ‘Likes’ from friends, Hide the friend connection updates, Hide the attachments. You can download the script from here.

Update-1: A new version (v 1.3) is available with two new features – Hide updates from Facebook Places, Hide Facebook Questions. You can download the script from here.

Update-2: Version 1.4 is just released to Userscripts.org. Features included: Hide Facebook Ticker, Show only the filtered posts. You can download the script from here.

Update-3: Version 1.5 is just released to Userscripts.org. Features included: Fix for new Facebook UI, Hide unread count of Groups / Lists updates. You can download the script from here.

Userscripts.org seems to go down frequently these days. Here is an alternate link to the script. Source code is available here.

-- Varun