With each update, Facebook has gotten incrementally more cluttered, perplexing, and ornery—and I'm not even talking about all your annoying acquaintances flooding it with inane status updates. Yet, at the same time, it's become a tool few of us can live without. If Facebook has you on your last nerve, here's how to fix some of its biggest annoyances in a matter of minutes—and with only one new addition to your browser. More »

Chrome: fPrivacy is a new Chrome add-on that gives you granular control over the permissions that Facebook apps request when you add them to or authorize them to access your account. For example, if you add a Facebook app and you're not too comfortable with the app's ability to post to your wall, or access your data at any time, you can deny those specific permissions while granting the other ones required for the app to function. More »

Chrome: If you want to skim through your Facebook news feed without stopping for each YouTube video someone posts, the Facebook Video Player extension will play videos in the upper right-hand corner of your window, allowing you to keep browsing as it plays. More »

Chrome: When we looked at some of your favorite Facebook customizers, many of you noted that all you really wanted was for Facebook to restore your news feed to its proper form. Facebook Classic is a Chrome plug-in that does just that. More »

Regardless of how you feel about Facebook's recent changes to its layout, there are plenty of tools that can help you take control of your experience without sacrificing your ability to keep in touch with friends and family.

The most annoying new feature in the Facebook redesign has to be the news ticker (although you can make an argument for some of the other additions as well). Tech blog SumTips came up with three ways to kill this feed. More »

Apps like FbCal already scour your Facebook friends list and puts their birthdays on your calendar, but what if you want to send them greetings without even thinking about it at all? HappyBirthday can do that. More »

Chrome: Whether or not you're planning to migrate from Facebook to some other service or you just want to back up all of your Facebook photos for posterity, PhotoLive is a Chrome extension that lets you download your photos an album at a time. More »

 

Web/Chrome/Android/iOS: Springpad is a free service that allows you to save places, notes, itemsand more to your account for future reference. The service just got a lot more social with today's update: now you can connect Springpad to your Facebook account to automatically show you items that your friends like, places they visit, and more in case you want to save them to your account. More »

Chrome/Firefox: FB Secure is a Chrome extension that gives you precise control over the permissions that a Facebook application or game gets when you connect it with your Facebook account. For example, if you're connecting an app but don't want it to post to your wall, you can deny those permissions while accepting the rest. More »

Start Google Plus is a great extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you update Twitter and Facebook from within Google+, also adding feeds from both social networks onto your main page. We mentioned it in our Facebook to Google+ migration guide, but felt it deserved to be highlighted on its own because it's so useful. More »

Parents fret all the time about protecting their kids on Facebook, but many of the products and services I’ve seen that aim to help are intrusive, and inject the parents into the child’s normal, healthy online social life in a way that’s awkward for both.

Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer: If you're loving Google+ but finding it to be virtual ghost town while your friends slowly trickle in, the Google+Facebook browser extension incorporates your Facebook feed to your Google+ stream. You can also post status updates and replies directly within Google+.More »

The “Questions” feature in Facebook may be useful to some folks, but I don’t find it useful for a couple of reasons.

First, the questions are more geared towards fun and virality rather than usefulness. I agree that the nature of questions depends on the people you’re connected to but I have hardly seen anyone praising the usefulness of Facebook questions.

Second, whenever there is a world event like the Royal wedding or the launch of a new gadget, my timeline suddenly gets filled with dozens of irrelevant questions in which I have no interest at all. Worst thing is that the same question appears multiple times in the timeline, whenever there is a new answer or someone posts a comment to the question

And the notifications.“Mr X has answered Mr Y’s question”. After a while, this gets really annoying and the sad part is that Facebook does not allow you to block Facebook questions like you can block a particular application, game, invites or a user.

Here is what the FAQ page reads

As with other Facebook applications like Photos and Events, there is no way to turn off Questions.

If you’re fed up with the spammy nature of Facebook questions and want to turn off the clutter, try the Hide Facebook Questions extension for Google Chrome. The extension hides every evidence of the “Questions” feature so your news feed doesn’t get cluttered with polls.Once installed, you will need to refresh Google Chrome and the Questions feature will vanish from your timeline.

And so will the notifications that used to come when one of your friends answered a question asked by another Facebook friend of yours.

Firefox fans can try the more advanced FB purity add-on which lets you fix some other annoyances apart from hiding Facebook questions in Firefox. For example, FB Purity allows you to use the older Facebook commenting system, where pressing Enter or Return adds a new line to your comment, and pressing the “Comment” button submits the comment.

Both the browser extensions works out of the box – there are no options to configure and nothing to tweak.

Chrome: Facebook has gotten seriously cluttered over the years, and if you'd like to tone it down by removing, say, the Groups button, the Messages dropdown, or the ads, Minimalist for Facebook will let you tweak it to your liking. More »

Windows/Mac: RockMelt, the new Chromium-based social networking browser, updated today to add improved Facebook chat, real-time Twitter updates, a bookmark-and-read-later function, and support for Chromium 10. More »

RockMelt, the Chromium-based social Web browser has reached a new milestone today. Following its first public beta that was released in early March, RockMelt Beta 2 has started being pushed to the browser's users. The new version brings many new features, alongside the usual bug fixes, performance enhancements, and a new base for the browser -- Chromium 10, which also powers Google Chrome's stable channel releases at the moment. The previous RockMelt beta was based on Chromium 9, and it's nice to see it kept up-to-date.

Perhaps the most intriguing new feature in RockMelt Beta 2 is the new bookmarking system, intuitively called View Later. RockMelt's developers have come to the conclusion that, in a modern browser that offers address auto-complete and makes the most visited sites accessible on the new tab page, people don't use bookmarks anymore -- at least not the way they used to back in the day. These days apparently, bookmarking is mostly about saving interesting pages for future reference. Which is where View Later comes in. You just click on the new clock icon at the far right of the address bar (where Chrome's star icon is), and you've added the page you're viewing to your View Later queue. You can even add individual posts from Facebook or Twitter. Your View Later contents are synced using RockMelt's general sync mechanism.

RockMelt Beta 2 also packs a new Twitter app, which now lets you edit retweets, view direct messages, reply to all, and easily use Twitter search. It uses Twitter's new real-time API, so you get the tweets exactly at the moment they're published.

The Chat bar has been redesigned, making it easier to keep track of multiple conversations, since chats are now docked in the Chat bar along the bottom of the browser, where they even stay visible while you browse the Web. Incoming chat messages will trigger notifications, and the ability to drag individual chat sessions out of the bar and into separate windows is still there.

All in all a solid update, that has started rolling out today and will reach all of the browser's users in a week's time. What remains to be seen is how many people are willing to switch from any of the 'big guys' to RockMelt for its added features.

Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer: If you need a bit of help sifting through your Google search results, browser extension Google +Like will direct you toward the most popular pages by telling you which results have the most "Likes" on Facebook. More »

Facebook has hired Google Corporate Development exec Amin Zoufonoun, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Zoufonoun has been with Google since 2003 and is the second most senior corp dev exec after David Lawee.

Zoufonoun will report to Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s director of corp dev.

Those of you who spend a lot of time online discovering and listening to music may want to check out Like.fm, a new app which is designed to automatically track and share what you play. It's a sort of 'discovery aggregator,' pulling in tunes from services like YouTube, Pandora, Rdio, and Grooveshark -- which already offer their own discovery tools.

Like.fm aims to provide one-stop shopping, so you and your friends don't have to remember to follow each other on a dozen different services. By aggregating data from a wide variety of sources, Like.fm hopes to make itself the place to get your new music recommendations. Facebook Connect support is also built-in, making it easy to find and follow your friends as you build out your Like.fm profile.