Excellatronic Communications

FB Purity Update : v7.5.0

New in this version of the FB Purity browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera)is a Single Column layout for Timeline option. As well as forcing Timeline pages to a single column, it also shortens the Cover image, and hides the horizontal “Friends”, “About”, and “Interests” Sections  so it takes up less vertical space. If you wish to see the full size Cover image, you can just click the “TL” button again, or else click on the short version of the Cover image, and the full version will pop up.

Also new is the ability to block Facebook applications at both the application’s Request Permissions page, where FB Purity will insert a “Block Application” button on the page, and the application pages themselves, where a “Block Application” link will be inserted at the bottom left hand corner of each Facebook application page.

You have to wonder why Facebook do not make blocking these applications easier. You also have to wonder why Facebook are censoring all links to the FBPurity.com website.

As you may have noticed Facebook are still blocking links to the FBPurity.com website, and libelling me by claiming my site is “spammy and unsafe”, thats hilarious coming from Facebook, the kings of spam (farmville anyone?) and all those dodgy “Check out whos viewing your profile” viral apps that keep spreading around.

Instead of linking to the fbpurity.com website, please link to this article instead, thanks.

Get the latest version of FB Purity v7.5.0 here

BTW If you appreciate the work I do on making Facebook easier to use, safer and less annoying, please donate: donate.fbpurity.com

Cheers,

Steve

( Developer of FB Purity )

Screenshots related to the latest version of FB Purity:

Image shows example Timeline Page in normal Facebook 2 column Layout, and also shows FB Puritys new “TL” button, next to the search box.

Image shows example Timeline Page after clicking FB Purity’s “TL” button, which enables FB Puritys Single Column Timeline layout. Once the green TL button is clicked, a red cross is displayed over it to show that single column layout is enabled. Clicking the button again re-enables the Facebook dual column layout.

FB Purity inserts “Block Application” buttons in all Facebook Application permission request pages, so you can now block applications, that you dont wish to interact with, very easily. It also highlights any apps that request access to your email address by displaying the Request with a pink background, to make the request stand out more, as its often easy to whizz through these screens without reading them, but hopefully this will trigger the user to pay a bit more attention.

Another image demonstrating F.B. Purity adding a “Block Application” button to a Facebook Application’s permissions request page, which Facebook should provide, but doesnt.

FB Purity also adds a “Block Application” link to all Facebook Application pages, which Facebook has failed to provide for some strange reason. This makes it easier to block applications that you have no desire to interact with.

This video shows how easy it is to disable Facebook Timeline with FB Purity in Google chrome:

There are also simple solutions for disabling / removing Timeline in Firefox, Safari and Opera here

The TLD system is open source and quite amazing, check it out

Please take my survey on what people hate most about facebook, as it will help me improve my F.B. Purity browser extension.

F.B Purity is a browser extension that fixes a lot of the things that people hate about Facebook, and also lets you clean it up and customise it.

You can get FB Purity here: http://fbpurity.com

Europe vs Facebook website details the battle against Facebooks terrible record on Privacy, and their lack of transparency despite their insistence their users must be transparent:
http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Objectives/objectives.html

How to get a copy of the data facebook has stored about you:
http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html

Even if you can no longer access your account: This was useful to me, as i wanted to access my data, but couldnt, so I requested them to send me a copy of the data, have also requested that they tell me why they disabled my account, and also requested that they re-enable it.

Gawker Story about Facebooks content moderation procedures and policies: http://gawker.com/5885714/inside-facebooks-outsourced-anti+porn-and-gore-brigade-where-camel-toes-are-more-offensive-than-crushed-heads

Allfacebook made an excellent point on Facebook’s decision to outsource their content moderation operations – “The people charged with making decisions about flagged content are underpaid subcontractors. If there were some way to do this in-house for a reasonable cost, perhaps fewer disputes would arise over content pulled erroneously.”

Yesterday Facebook disabled my personal account and also the F.B. Purity fan page, without any warning or explanation.

Not only have I been cut off from all my friends and family on Facebook, ive also had all my online memories erased and all Facebook messages and photos, and on top of that they have cut off all 36,000 fans from getting support and the latest information about F.B. Purity by disabling the F.B. Purity Fan Page too.

Any emails to Facebook get an automated response basically saying they wont re-enable the account and they wont discuss the reasons for disabling it.

Pretty sh*t all round, and it means the future of FB Purity hangs in the balance. I originally developed FB Purity for myself to fix the annoying things i found with Facebook, but it grew much larger than just my own personal project, and it now has over 40,000 users around the world.

Now that I don’t even have a Facebook account, it seems like theres not much p0int continuing with it, though i expect thats probably the outcome Facebook were hoping for by disabling my account as they dont like users having control over what they see in their newsfeed or being able to customise their Facebook experience.

I have set up a new F.B. Purity Fan Page on Google Plus which you can access via the following redirect URL : fans.fbpurity.com

Please help spread the news, if you have a blog or know anyone in any news organisations etc please pass the story on.

Ive posted the story to Reddit. If you have an account on there, please vote the story up to help publicise the issue.

If you know anyone at Facebook who could help get my account re-enabled, or if you have any other ideas as to what course of action i should take, please do get in touch via the F.B. Purity Contact Form

Cheers,

Steve (The creator of F.B. Purity)

FB Purity Cleans up Your Facebook Experience

I figured out how to disable / delete / hide the Facebook Timeline! Many thought it wasnt possible, but here i will show you how its done, banish Timeline to the pits of hell (till they remove the loophole that is hehe)

Get the full instructions on how to disable Facebook Timeline

I’ve updated FB Purity to v6.1.1 to fix various issues it was having. Heres the change log:

FB Purity is a free web browser extension that lets you clean the junk from your facebook homepage and newsfeeds. Its available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari (and is now also compatible with Seamonkey and IceApe)

Changes in FB Purity v6.1.1

1. Fixed fan page story filter (which hides stories from the pages you have liked) + the logged in user filter (which stops your own posts getting filtered).
2. Fixed the attending and attended an event filters.
3. Fixed the intermittent “FB Glitch” errors that would crop up occasionally on friends list pages.
4. Fixed the too-wide tabbed textareas on FBPs options screen (css, whitelist + custom text)
5. Improved tabbed textareas differentiation (so user can see more easily that they are separate entitiies)
6. Fixed the Upload photo button duplication problem.
7. Fixed the erroneous “friend requested” buttons, which were showing up, if you clicked on a “became friends” story in the news ticker bar.
8. Added “shared an event” to the “created event” filter
9. Fixed the “shared a link” filter to filter out more links than before, as quite a few were getting past the filter previously.

Get the latest version of FB Purity here: http://www.fbpurity.com

Heres a list of changes in the latest version of FB Purity (v6.0.0)

The Firefox extension version is now restartless, which means you do not have to restart your browser each time you uninstall or reinstall the extension. (Please note that you need to first uninstall the old version of the firefox extension and restart your browser before installing this version, as it needs to clear out the old non-restartless extension first in order to work)

Added a hide “read an article” option (Not interested in what newspaper stories your friends are reading? well tick this box on the fbp options screen, and they will be hidden.

The Application Whitelist and Custom Text Filter are now bigger boxes, so you can see a lot more text at the same time, and also each item now needs to be on a separate line, rather than comma separated. The boxes are now in a tabbed format, so in order to view each box you need to click on the specific box’s heading at the top of the screen.

Fixed the shared photo filter, so it should now hide more of those “cartoon” and joky images that are getting shared and seem to be all the rage. Tick this option if you want to hide all that kind of junk.

Fixed the fan page stories filter, if you have “clicked like” on lots of facebook pages, you will no doubt be snowed under with endless updates from all those pages, making it hard to find any of your actual real friends status updates etc. Ticking this option will hide all updates from Facebook fan pages from your newsfeed.

Updated the facebook places (checkins) filter, I added a little code to catch a few more of these types of updates.

Sped up the page filtering, ive received reports that the page filtering is now a lot quicker in this new version :)

I fixed the event story filters, so if you are not keen on hearing who is attending/attended events or not interested in people who are creating events all the time, tick this option and those types of stories will be hidden.

I removed the redundant box hiding options. There were a few box hiding options on the fbp settings screen, that are no longer relevant, so i removed them. Please note that if you select to hide the events box, it also hides the pokes and birthdays messages from the left hand column, this is due to how the html code is structured. Also selecting the “hide sponsored box” option not only hides the ads, it also hides other boxes such as the “people to subscribe to” box, “people you may know” and also the “recommended pages” boxes.

I reduced the multiple “wrote on wall” options to a single “wrote on wall” option, the reason for this is it is much harder to differentiate each type of “wrote on wall” post, when filtering with text alone, so i decided it would make sense to merge those options in to a single “wrote on wall” filter option.

I added a basic check for updates button, have not gone down the automatic updates route, as im a bit worried my server will get hammered by all the extra browser requests. This way, if you are curious to see if theres an update available you can simply click the “check for updates” link at the top of the FBP options screen.

I made FBP stop filtering the current logged in user’s and the fbp fab page’s updates. It was a bit annoying that the recent fbp status updates were hidden because i included tips on how to hide certain types of stories in the newsfeed by utilising hte custom text filter, but the phrases i was suggesting to use, actually got caught by the filter themselves (hoist by their own petard, so to speak lol), anyway that should be a thing of the past now that ive made sure fbp doesnt filter out your own posts or those of the FBP fan page.

For more info on this release and to provide feedback, see the FB Purity fan page

The latest firefox extension (v6.0.0) as well as now being “restartless” it is also now compatible with Seamonkey and Iceape.

If you appreciate my work on FBP, please donate http://donate.fbpurity.com, and please let your friends know about FBP too :)

F.B. Purity is a browser extension that cleans up your Facebook homepage, its compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. It decreases the Facebook noise and increases the signal, letting you just see what you want to in your newsfeed.

Install the updated version of F.B. Purity (v6.0.0)

I just read a post on modaco, that links to the xda-developers forum that has a link to a working version of the Adobe Flash player that is compatible with the Orange San Francisco / ZTE Blade phone.

It works on youtube and even the BBC Iplayer, fantastic!!! :)

Im using the Ginger Stir Fry version of Android on my Blade. The video and sound quality on BBC IPlayer using this app is really good, and the phone’s cpu is not even overclocked! :)

Get the Flash Player 10.2 APK application file via this link install_flash_player_10.2.157.340.apk

Enjoy! :)

*UPDATE FLASH PLAYER 10.3 RELEASED*
Flash Player 10.3 has now been released, and also works on the ZTE Blade/Orange San Francisco, get it here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1309406