eep! – a blog

So any of you who are my friends on facebook will have seen that I went off on a bit of a rant recently about people (almost continuously) ‘becoming fans’ of often completely inane things. If you aren’t my friend on facebook, you aren’t really missing much, except me generally complaining that ‘it isn’t as good as twitter’. Here is a sample of my ire:

I’m on about shite like “Geoff became a fan of mobile phone chargers”. Seriously; they are useful, but being a fan would suggest waving a flag or buying a t-shirt or something. And I’m not planning on buying a t-shirt that says “Phone chargers – fuck yeah!”

So after a spot of delving through facebook’s new and less useful privacy and newsfeed controls, I discovered that I was stuck with all the ‘becoming a fan’ stories except for individually hiding the worst culprits from my homescreen. Thank goodness however for Google Chrome and it’s multitude of extensions chock full of scripty goodness. I have now installed the Better Facebook Fixer extension and now from within facebook I can turn off the types of news I don’t want to see in my feed. I’m sure Greasemonkey will do something similar for you Firefox types as well.

Thing is, that considering that facebook is meant to be about social networking, the amount of news, with the fan-page activity muted is so much lower. Lower to the extent that I get the impression that the actual social utility of facebook has been reduced, in favour of people clicking on banal crud. Hmm…

For more thoughts on this, why not become a fan of eep.me.uk…