My most popular blog post ever is “Hide Games From Your Facebook Timeline.” I’m glad to have helped so many people rid themselves of the scourge of Farmville and Mafia Wars. However, that warm feeling has always been marred by the BlackBerry owners who comment pitiably on that post, saying they still get all the undesired notifications when they’re on the go.
It seems Research In Motion is the author of the Facebook app, and they’ve done a very poor job of coordinating with the web version of Facebook, so new message notifications are repeated, and changes to your timeline preferences are completely ignored. For its part, Facebook seems uninterested in developing its own app for BlackBerry, as they’ve done for iOS and Android.
But now, at last, there may be hope.
HootSuite, one of the most respected third-party apps in the social media space, now has a BlackBerry app! You can use it from your mobile device to manage both your Facebook profile and Twitter feed from one application. And given the high level of flexibility HootSuite offers for tending your feed, surely it will once and for all allow you to regain control of your timeline.
If you’re on a BlackBerry, please give it a try at HootSuite.com/BlackBerry. I’d be grateful if you let me know in the comments how it worked.
What high level of flexibility? Do you mean yes/no to vibrate? Or how long to refresh? Darn Farmville requests still come through and I don’t see a way to change it.
I suppose I should read the manual, but I expected to see something under Edit Tabs/Stream but there’s nothing there. Moving tabs doesn’t even work (I have one of each account only).
A visitor named “Mer” chimed in on the older thread, saying “If you have a Blackberry click on the arrow just underneath your status bar and change to ‘status updates’ in your facebook app instead of ‘news feed’ and all those incredibly annoying game updates disappear! ”
If this is anything like the iPhone app, then I imagine you’ll have other choices in that menu like Photos and Links. It may be a pain to go through each individually, but no worse than scrolling through all the garbage.