A way to make facebook less annoying

If you spend a lot of time reading things on the internet and aren’t using an RSS reader of some sort, you’re almost definitely wasting more time and effort than you should be. This video explains how RSS and feed readers work and what they can do for you:

(the video won’t show up if you’re reading this on a feed, then again you probably don’t need to watch it..)

OK, so on to the facebook part. I was really getting annoyed with emails from facebook like “Charlie Brown added you as a friend!” and “Linus wrote on your wall!” etc. Now, one solution would be to make a label in gmail for facebook and filter all the notifications to there, but I think an RSS reader (like Google Reader) is a better match, since it’s built for handling notifications like this (plus I have a pretty good system for turning these notifications into low-priority action items).

Anyway, all you have to do is log in to facebook, click Inbox, click the Notifications tab, then click the Your Notifications tab on the right. Add that feed to whatever feed reader you use. Then, click “account” (upper right), then the Notifications tab, uncheck all the boxes, and save changes.

Now you won’t get spammed every time something happens. Still not a great system (why does it just say “Lucy posted on your wall” instead of actually telling me what was posted? Seems anti-user, to me).