Product Recommendation: FB Purity

I mentioned before the stress and aggravation I get daily from people sharing their horrible politics on Facebook. It’s tempted me to quit the site before, but it would be sad for me to lose touch with all of my friends outside my immediate area just because some people post viral articles on God or grass or guns or gays or gender ad nauseum.

I recently found a solution in the form of the FB Purity add-on for Firefox (there are similar versions for other popular browsers as well as Opera). It allows you to fine-tune your Facebook settings in ways that (crucially) include an option not to show links or image macros. So I can hear about people’s moves and new children and interesting observations on life without having the entire blogosphere blasted at me. I can also turn off invitations to raise people’s imaginary cows and suggestions to join someone’s virtual Mafia. It’s a huge relief and for the first time I am finally starting to enjoy social media and consider using it more often.

So of course Facebook is trying to ban it and sue its creator. It’s kind of reassuring how consistently horrible Facebook is all the time. It’s like they looked at Google and their whole “don’t be evil” thing and thought “nah, that’s not for us.”