Here’s a true gift given in the spirit of the season….How to remove those annoying Facebook notifications that alert you every time one of your “friends” makes a move using Farmville, Mafia Wars, Yoville or one of the umpteen others.

We have all experienced the constant stream of notifications that have become part of the daily experience if you are a Facebook user. And lets face it, who isn’t using Facebook at this point?

Applications on Facebook, in my opinion, have become nothing short of noise that completely clutters my News & Live Feeds. I have eliminated having notifications sent to my phone which was a big improvement but I am finding that even when I visit the site (having mentally prepared myself for the inevitable onslaught), the updates have become intrusive and ridiculous. I have taken action and so can you.

I asked myself what kind of gift could I give my readers in the spirit of the holiday season that will adequately say a genuine “Thank you” for your comments and encouragement during my first six months. I think this fits the bill. So without further adieu, here you go.

Go into your Live Feed or your News Feed and find the notification that really annoys you most…..there are a million to choose from. Here’s a partial list:

Some Facebook Apps

Once you are in your Live or News Feed, let your mouse hover over one of your notifications. If you pull your mouse to the right, you will see a button that says “Hide”.

Click on it!!!

Mutt Media on how to hide annoying Facebook App notifications

You will then see a pop up window dialogue box, similar to the one below. Simply click on the button that says, “Hide ______________” and voila – you are done!

Mutt Media on hiding your Facebook App notifications

Please give this a try and let me know when you’ve found Facebook bliss. No – that’s not another App, it’s a state of being.

Happy Holidays, everyone!!

Rodney Bradford is a Brooklyn teen who was accused of a robbery that took place on October 17 and was held on Riker’s Island for 12 days!!!

Turns out that Bradley had been wrongly identified at the scene by a “witness” who claimed to see him there. In fact, he was at his father’s home in Harlem – nowhere near where the robbery took place in the Farragut section of Brooklyn. Even other, multiple witnesses coming forward to say they saw Rodney at his father’s wasn’t enough to clear him from being a suspect.

It was only thanks to a status update on Facebook, “Where my IHOP?” that they were able to trace Bradley’s electronic “fingerprint” back to his dad’s computer back in Harlem.

The family is taking the position that Facebook saved Rodney. Pretty scary. Robert Reuland, Bradford’s attorney said it well…”It reflects the pervasiveness that Web sites and social networking has on our lives.”

You can read the story in its entirety as it appeared in the New York post by clicking here.

Interesting, so take a look and consider how you are getting your information and ask yourself, “Is this the best resource?” Consider the timeliness of data collection and reporting the next time you go looking to “Google”.

Clive Thompson on How the Real-Time Web Is Leaving Google Behind
By Clive Thompson 09.21.09

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, millions of people flooded onto Google News to find the latest information about what had happened. The spike in traffic was so massive that Google suspected a malware attack and began blocking anyone searching for “Michael Jackson.”

It’s a funny story, but it illustrates how the Web is changing. People increasingly turn to the Internet for up-to-the-minute information about, well, everything—blog postings about celebrity antics, status updates from friends, and pictures and videos of political events as they unfold, like the protests over the Iranian election. Studies have shown that these types of search requests are on the rise.

Pundits call it the real-time Web. It’s upending the Internet as we’ve known it, and it’s not something that Google can easily dominate.

For more than 10 years, Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority. The company measures which sites have the most links pointing to them—crucial votes of confidence—and checks to see whether a site grew to prominence slowly and organically, which tends to be a marker of quality. If a site amasses a zillion links overnight, it’s almost certainly spam.

But the real-time Web behaves in the opposite fashion. It’s all about “trending topics”—zOMG a plane crash!—which by their very nature generate a massive number of links and postings within minutes. And a search engine can’t spend days deciding what is the most crucial site or posting; people want to know immediately.

So a new generation of search engines like Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta are trying to redefine what makes a piece of information important.

Some of these sites offer a Digg-like indexed front page that displays hot topics, while others just include a simple search field. But most of them rely heavily on Twitter. When a burst of tweets citing a particular subject or URL emerges, it’s a “signaling event,” as Rishab Ghosh of Topsy puts it. To make sure they’re not just getting hoodwinked by spammers, these new search engines employ some clever tricks, like crawling tweeted URLs and discarding those that land on sites containing spamlike language. Most disregard Twitter users who behave like spambots—for example, ones that follow thousands of people but have very few followers themselves.

Other ploys abound. OneRiot has a toolbar that lets users flag an interesting post immediately. Collecta actively imports blog posts and tweets so they appear in search results less than a second after they go live, rather than the hours it can take regular search engines to catalog the same info. “We want to be limited only by the speed of light,” Collecta CTO Jack Moffitt jokes.

The result is something curiously different from regular searching. If you hunt for “Michael Jackson” on a traditional engine like Ask.com or Bing, the vast majority of the links remain the same day to day. Authority changes slowly on the “old” Web. But real-time search engines deliver different, updated results almost every time.

The creators of these new engines argue that their goal isn’t to answer questions— à la Google—but to organize experience into a keyhole glimpse of what the world is doing at this very moment. “It’s exactly what your friends are going to be talking about when you get to the bar tonight,” OneRiot executive Tobias Peggs says. “That’s what we’re finding.” Google settles arguments; real-time search starts them.

Edo Segal, a pioneer in real-time search, thinks the field is going to explode as updates become more automatic, with our devices autoreporting where we are, how we’re feeling, and what we’re doing and seeing. Old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment. “Google organized our memory,” Segal says. “Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”

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Enjoy

This has been your Daily Bone
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