I know exactly what you mean about going down my Facebook News Feed and seeing uninteresting drivel from people who I don't want to unplug from entirely, but from whom their daily trivia just isn't that interesting. Worse are those friends who are really into Farmville, Mafia Wars or similar and just clog up my news feed with their game updates. I mean, really, who thinks I care about that kind of stuff?

Gad, I sound like a cranky guy, don't I? :-)

Fortunately, Facebook gives us some control over what shows up in the news feed, though the idea of a sophisticated filtering system that let you specify how much detail you wanted to know from different people based on the strength of your relationship with them is awesome but, um, doesn't exist. Yet. I really like the idea, though. Maybe once he stops being a movie star, Mark Zuckerberg and his team can work on it...

What you can do to tame your Facebook news feed is to hide updates from specific applications, which I find essential to wresting control of my Facebook experience. It can be a bit tricky to figure out, but the basic strategy is to try and hide every update you don't like, and then see if it would hide the person (usually not good) or updates from a specific app (often exactly what you want).

Here's a typical Facebook news feed update:

If I move the cursor to the top right of the imaginary box that contains just this update, an "X" appears. Click on it and...

Oops, I don't want to hide my friend Jeff. I click on "Cancel".

Another update, and I'll again look for the "X":

This time in addition to the option of hiding Kevin, I also see "Hide Meetup". That's a good idea as I don't want to see these sort of updates:

A single mouse click and I just removed all Meetup.com updates from my Facebook News Feed, past, present or future:

At any time (if I remember) I can always pop back to my Facebook settings and tweak what apps I have hidden. One way would be to hide something and use this shortcut, but you can also find the configuration screen at Account --> Privacy Settings, then look at the bottom for "Applications and Websites".