Facebook has recently rolled out something called “Happening Now” to my Facebook profile, and I find it exceptionally irritating because this is even more detailed than my news feed. Now, I have a scrolling update not just on what my friends have posted, what they comment on, what they liked, when they have been tagged etc, I am also “informed” when they have posted a comment to their own photos or wall comments – even on matters and things which my interest goes as just taking a look most of the time. It is even more irritating when I get “informed” of things I may have clicked on the ‘X’ to hide it so I won’t ever see them again. After all, if I was interested in keeping track of a particular wall post, note or picture, I would have “liked” them or made a comment so that I will automatically get an update when anything get posted on those!

That’s not all. The Facebook chat feature which I have always turned off, now keeps popping up “tempting” me to try it whenever I refresh the Facebook page. It just won’t go away even after I have turned it off. Sort of like a toggle switch which after you have turned off the lights to your bathroom automatically turns the light back on the moment you walk past it. Utterly irritating, isn’t it?

Has Facebook run out of ideas? Why do I need something similar to a Twitter feed inside Facebook or a more detailed version of the traditional Facebook News Feed? I am already unhappy I don’t have a detailed enough filter to automatically eliminate stuff I didn’t want to see! The worst part of it all is that I can’t even disable it and in the case of the chat, it refused to “remember” I had. Even if all these are just for trial, I want the option to be able to disable it. I hate it not only because it is feeding things I don’t want, but because it is also making a decision for me by assuming that I would like it and not providing me the option to disable it.

I searched in Google and found nothing on how I can disable it. My friend Joey mentioned that he only managed to get rid of it after he gave Facebook feedback. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy option for me to give feedback quickly. I ain’t going to navigate through several pages only to find a feedback page when I do not know when someone will act on it. I simply want to be able to just click something and make it go away, pronto!

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So instead of wasting my time searching in Google to find where I can bring up Facebook’s feedback page, I continued searching on Google to find out how I can disable it. It was a futile search and only after I changed the search parameters that I found F.B. Purity – a script which I can install in the browser (only Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Opera supported) so I can rid of all those irritating junk that Facebook has been adding over the years in the sidebar – for e.g. advertisements, sponsors etc. All of this is done with a few clicks, but it still doesn’t vanquish the irritating feeds from “Happening Now”. Arrgghhhh!!

I was about to uninstall it when I decided to give it one last look. I went back to the site and did a search for “Happening Now” and apparently there are suggestions on what I can do to disable it. Unfortunately, the suggested solution didn’t work, but it gave me ideas. Since I don’t really care about what shows up on the right sidebar anyway (including pokes, or birthday notifications because I get an email every week informing of upcoming birthdays), I decided I could disable it completely.

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So I added what a small piece of ‘code’ into the Custom CSS box in F.B. Purity and viola… the entire sidebar was gone! I can once and for all vanquish all these nonsense I have been forced to live with as and when I wanted to. It even come with a custom text filter which I have always been asking for but never getting from Facebook. I haven’t yet tested it but I am glad it exists. There’s a slight drawback on any other browser other than FireFox, however. While it worked on all Facebook pages (even apps.facebook.com) on FireFox, it doesn’t work beyond the newsfeed page on the rest of the support browsers (such as Google Chrome). I don’t mind because that is good enough since I am usually on the News Feed page most of the time.

Frankly, I rarely whine about Facebook and its boo-boos, even when at one point of time it rolled back the privacy settings of my friends and caused some misunderstanding between us. I also didn’t made fuss when Facebook credit suddenly became the only “currency” that is accepted in Facebook games – which means whatever credits I bought for the games suddenly become almost worthless overnight. All I had to say was that Facebook credits was not a new idea anyway since qq.com had implement the QQ Coin [QQ 币] for several years. It made me wonder why it took so long to actually implement it. Perhaps they had a hard time arm twisting the game makers into accepting it because of the cut they are making out of this.

All I want to say is, there’s only so much nonsense users can take even though the service is provided more or less for free. I know Facebook rarely gives a damn about our complaints or feedback much like the Singapore government in the past, but with Google+ users may no longer take this shit lying down.

Addendum (23-Sep-2011)

F.B. Purity has released several updates since I first made this post. They have included a feature to easily turn off the ticker without the need to add those ‘difficult’ CSS codes. (See screen shot below)