You're right and this is driving me a bit bonkers too: it used to be that the secret "Hide" button on Facebook updates would reveal the options of hiding all updates from that specific person or just hiding updates from the application (e.g., Farmville :-) in your Feed, while still seeing other updates from that person.
Turns out that in a desire to streamline things, Facebook has taken a bit too much of a step towards simplification, and this is something I figured out by simply experimenting, worrying that I'd end up blocking a friend's updates entirely.
The trick? Just click on the "hide" button and it does the right thing.
Let me show you.
Here's an update I saw a few days ago:
I like Jerry and want to stay plugged in with what he's doing, but I'm just not interested in Mafia Wars so want to hide the app update. How? First off, move the cursor to the top right of the update space:
That's what we want. Used to give us options, as I said earlier, but now, just click on it and ...
If you later decide that you do want to get updates from a specific application you'll need to find that app in your Settings and re-enable it. The "Edit Options" only lets you specify which friends you want to hide / unhide. Confusing, isn't it?
Hope that helps you out!
And while we're at it, you should know that I have quite a bit of Facebook help here on the site and that I also have an Ask Dave Taylor Facebook Fan Page that I invite you to join.
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There is an alternative, and perhaps easier way to hide App updates.
When you're looking at your Facebook 'home' page, in the left most column you will see a list of items (News feed, Status updates, Notes, etc.). Hit the 'more' link at the bottom and the entire list will show. This also adds little bars to the right of each entry. You can then click on these bars and move them items around. By dragging Status updates to the top you'll only see your friends status updates on your home page.
This does also hide things like photo updates however so it's handy to move that to position two so you can manually check it from time to time.
For me this was a much simpler solution than having to hit hide for all the various apps that my friends use. Hope it helps!
-Nic