Facebook Purity

Are you annoyed with that Facebook friend who is constantly watering her FarmVille plants? Do you not care about how many people are in Bobby’s Mafia Wars? Look no further than FB Purity, a user script that hides friends’ applications from appearing on your news/live feed. It is customizable; you can choose to hide multiple other friend stories such as becoming a fan, joining a group, and going to an event. FB Purity is compatible with, and requires you to download Greasemonkey before installation.

After restarting the browser, log in to your Facebook account and note the FB Purity options at the top right-hand side of the news/live feed. The add-on shows how many apps and other stories it is hiding. Clicking on the “Show” button is supposed to show the applications; however, the applications do not show up in our tests, but the other stories do. This is not too hindering unless you care about viewing your friends’ application updates.

To customize which stories show up, click on the “FB Purity” link and select what you want hidden; the interface is extremely intuitive. Apart from having the option to hide a multitude of stories including profile updates and tagged photos, you can hide the suggestions box, sponsored box, and the “get connected” box in the right-hand panel of the screen. Facebook has the ability to hide unwanted applications for you, but having all these options clearly marked in one place is very practical. Facebook does not have the ability to hide the side-panel boxes.

The ability to hide different aspects of Facebook, while still having the option to display them, is extremely useful. This add-on is great for people who miss the olden days of Facebook, where cow pictures did not show up in every other post.

Facebook Purity hides application messages and also hides “Became a friend of”,”Joined a group”,”Became a fan of”,”Is attending event” type messages, which are referred to as Extras. The application whitelist lets you specify particular applications, whose messages you want to see on your homepage. The script comes with a default list of applications that will not be hidden by the Facebook Purity app filter.