First off, it was smart of you to not unfriend them entirely but to "hide" them specifically because you can reverse the action without them ever knowing they were temporarily on your invisible list. Some things are just best for other people not to know!

On the other hand, it's easy to fall into the trap of having tons of friends but hiding most of them so it acts as if you've only got a small circle of friends. Why is that dangerous? Because you can then forget that Mr X and Ms Y are "friends" and are reading every one of your updates, checking out your photos, watching your location check-ins, etc. My daughter has a good strategy in this regard: if she doesn't want to see someone's news, she simply isn't friends with them.

I have previous written about how to hide someone's newsfeed (status) updates in Facebook but let's review real quickly by picking on my friend Brett. Here's an update he had that showed up recently in my Facebook newsfeed:

Dude, I don't want to see this sort of stuff in my newsfeed! To "hide" his future updates from my Facebook newsfeed, all I have to do is move the cursor to the top right corner of his update, at which point an "X" will appear. Clicking on it reveals a hidden menu:

If you guessed I clicked on "Hide all by Brett" you'd be right. B'bye, Brett.

Now later I realize with a start that Brett's actually a great guy and I do want to see his status updates in my newsfeed. To reverse my action I need to completely ignore all the "Account" information and settings on the top right and instead click on the black triangle immediately adjacent to "Most Recent", as you can see here:

The last choice, "Edit Options...", is what I need to choose, and it brings up a window that contains all the people I'm currently hiding from my newsfeed:

Yup, you can see that I am hiding 285 of my "friends". I bet I'm not alone in hiding 10-20% of my Facebook pals either, before you say anything too snide about that number! :-)

To unhide Brett, I'll need to scroll down to find his name in the list:

Unhiding him from my newsfeed is as easy as clicking on the "x" next to his name. One click, a click on "Save", and he's back!

Don't be surprised, however, if you go back to your Facebook newsfeed and don't immediately see your friend reappear. It seems that it can't go back in time and it basically unhides future updates from your previously hidden friend.

The best news? Your cousin will never know what happened...