By Mitch Wagner 
InformationWeek 
April 6, 2009 04:00 AM 

Some of us are noisier than others. Indeed, this article might also be headlined “how to get Mitch Wagner to shut up,” because I am most definitely part of the problem. I just love to share on Facebook. How do you get blabbermouths like me to shut up and stop bothering you?

Well, you can un-friend them of course. I’ve done that with a few people who are active on Facebook, and whom I barely know. But un-friending people has consequences. As obnoxious as your cousin’s political links might be, un-friending him could be awkward at the next family Bar Mitzvah.

Fortunately, there’s a way to get rid of obnoxious people’s updates without un-friending them — and it’s actually pretty simple.

3 Easy Steps To Silence

 
Remember, the word “Hide” won’t show up unless you hover your mouse over an update posted by the person you want to hide. So, go ahead, hide news items on Facebook from over-sharing motormouths, and enjoy the blessed silence.Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin (who has wisely chosen to ignore my recent friend request) shares some additional tips.
 
You can add [people you hide] back to your stream at any time by going to the bottom of the page and clicking on ‘Edit Options’ and then ‘Add to News Feed’ beside their names. 

“In addition, you can create a special Friend List of the people you care about the most. That Friend List will appear on the left hand navigationmenu giving you the ability to filter your stream by those friends and see only their updates. If you want that list to be the default every time you go to your home page, you can drag that list above the ‘News Feed’ filter. Whatever filter is at the top will be your default view.”

She noted that Facebook is constantly tweaking its user interface, so what you see on your screen might be slightly different from what’s described in these instructions and shown in the accompanying image gallery. But it should be close enough — until Facebook does another radical redesign, that is.

 
Keep Your Friends Separate

And now, here’s how to create a Friend List:

1. Click “Friends” on the blue horizontal bar at the very top of your Facebook page. Select “All Friends” from the dropdown. 
2. Select an existing Friend List from the vertical sidebar on the left side of the page, or click the blue “Make a New List” button and create a new list. 
3. Look for the text box near the top of the center column, labeled “Add to list.” Start typing a friend’s name in that box and then when the correct friend’s name comes up on the list below the box, select that name by clicking it or hitting “Enter” on your keyboard. Alternately, you can click the “Select Multiple Friends” button, and see a list of all your friends, and click on the ones you want to include in your list.

 I’ve created one list so far, called “Fav” for people who are actually my friends and family in real life.

New communications technology requires new forms of etiquette. When answering machines became popular, people argued about whether it was polite to screen calls. People argued over Caller ID. Now, we’re starting to see arguments about appropriate of social media like Facebook.

I think in the future we’ll see a consensus that you’re not required to subscribe to your friends’ Twitter feeds, or Facebook news, or blogs. That’s what I already tell people who complain about my social media garrulousness, I say, “I realize my style isn’t for everyone — if you want to un-friend me, I won’t be offended.”

 
How do you handle people who talk too much on social media? Or are you the one who talks too much — how do you handle complaints? Let us know.

Facebook is working to restore access to the photos.

Popular social networking site Facebook.com admitted in a blog post today that over the weekend, a hard drive failure led to the temporary loss of 10% to 15% of the photographs stored by its users.

According to the company, several drives failed at once during a routine upgrade Friday night.

“You may have noticed in the past day that some photos aren’t appearing or are displaying a ‘question mark’ graphic when you go to view them. We’re trying to fully understand what happened, since simultaneous hardware failures like this are rare,” Evan Priestley, an engineer at Facebook Inc., stated in his blog.

Facebook said its users’ photos are safe because it stores multiple copies of the data for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes, and it is working to make the photos affected by the system failure available again as soon as possible.

“We’ve already repaired about one-third of affected photos and expect to complete repairs on another third tonight,” Priestley wrote. “However, even though your photos are safe, we can’t serve photos off the affected storage volumes until they’re repaired.”

The repair process involves copying large amounts of data to new drives, Priestley said. “This is why some photos aren’t showing up right now.”

Facebook is restoring photos as it repairs the hard drives, so some of those drives will likely be working again today. The social network site should be back to normal by early next week, it said.

“New photo uploads will continue to work properly during the repairs, because we write them to different storage volumes. Thanks for bearing with us while we return things to normal,” Priestley said.