If you have ever walked down a Las Vegas street with a young child, you have probably wished you had a way to selectively block their view of certain signs, posters and fliers. Likewise, if you use FaceBook or MySpace you probably wish that there are certain aspects that you could just skip over.
Well – while selective vision does not work in real life – it can work on the Internet with tools like Greasemonkey which is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. Once you have Greasemonkey you can download scripts that allow you to add things to websites or hide components of web sites. Many of these scripts will work Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari in addition to Firefox.
So, for example, if you are a Facebook user who is tired of quizzes – from the type of smile someone has to who you will vote for, to when a celebrity will get married you can install the Facebook Purity Greasemonkey extension. It will only block quizzes and trivia, and has a handy block that shows in the upper right of your Facebook page (and just to the right of this post). If you happen to be bored, you can click on see all and once again participate in all these wonderful quizzes. to show them again. Choice! Now I found out useful happenings about my friends.
Maybe you love MySpace more than Facebook – well fear not as there are tools for you too. Test out Ad Slicer For Myspace which does an excellent job of removing the ads and the space they occupy. Or step up to Remove Anything which is a very customizable script that allows you to remove anything you want including featured music, comedy and ads. It’s pretty easy to use and offers you control over what part(s) of MySpace you want to block.
Maybe YouTube is your thing. Perhaps you have a big monitor that you like to take advantage of. Well with Play YouTube videos in full screen auto you can have YouTube videos automatically open into full screen mode, completely bypassing the stand alone page. Or try out YouTube Cleaner which helps you clean up the appearance of the YouTube video pages by removing the comments, related videos, promoted videos and footer information. And, if you change your mind, it’s one-click to restore all that you have blocked.
There are scripts for a growing number of sites – just check out Userscripts.org to search for scripts that can help you format the sites you routinely visit.
There has been lots of talk of user generated content, but this is even better, user blocked content. The concept started with ad-blocking but has moved way beyond just blocking ads. Essentially you can now way, I don’t care what the site thinks is important, I know what is important to me. A cool feature on the Internet and imagine if this would work in real life. Maybe you like a morning radio program, but can’t stand one of the regular guests – what if you could just program your radio to suppress any comments by this person. Or maybe you are at a party with a person who is talking about annoying Facebook quizzes, maybe you could just make them…..nah, that’s years away!
Comments on this entry are closed.