One of Facebook’s most polarizing features is the wide variety of time-killing applications. If you’ve visited the site lately, you’ve doubtless seen a number of items in your News Feed updating you on your friends’ progress in Farmville, Mafia Wars, and many others.
Did you know it’s easy to remove these updates from your timeline, without disconnecting from your friends? Just find one of these posts and click the “Hide” link that appears on the right when you mouse over it.
Facebook will then ask you if you want to hide the person or the application. Click the name of the game.
Success! You’ll now no longer see updates on the games your friends are playing on Facebook, and you’ll see more links, photos and status updates instead.
Update: It gets even better. (Thanks to techpp.com) Not only can you keep games and other apps out of your Live Feed, you can also exclude them from your Notifications. When a notification appears in the lower right of your screen, mouse over the upper right corner of the item to see the “X” appear. Click that, and you’ll be invited to hide all notifications from that application.
I’ve been a fan of LovelyCharts.com for some time now. I got in on the private beta and found it to be really useful and even a little fun.
If you ever use flowcharts, org charts, wireframes, or similar diagrams to communicate your ideas, LovelyCharts makes it much less tedious to put those documents together. If, like me, you’ve ever used Illustrator, Fireworks, or (God help me) Quark to draw a diagram or flowchart, this is for you.
Of course there are powerful and perhaps even more flexible charting applications out there. But if you don’t use them often enough to justify their cost or learning curve, then this web-based tool is the answer.
A free account should do almost everything you need to create an occasional flowchart or diagram. You can save the result as an image file to use however you like. Premium accounts add extra features like version history and collaborative tools.
Here’s a 5 minute tutorial on saving advanced search criteria in Google into a javascript bookmark. So you can select any text on any web page and run a search on that text using your advanced criteria.
I use it to track what my competitors are saying about any topic I run into.
