A dear friend of mine and I were having drinks the other night when the subject of Facebook came up. He was telling me about one of his Facebook friends that posts prolific and annoying status updates.

His biggest concern was that he didn’t want to see all of her updates but didn’t want to unfriend her and risk hurting her feelings.

I explained to him that he could ‘silence’ her from his News Feed without unfriending her.

It’s as simple as this:

When you see the offending person who you would like to silence float by on your News Feed, simply point your mouse over the right-hand upper corner of their status update or post (as shown by the arrow and circle) and an arrow will appear.

Click on that arrow and a drop-down menu with options will appear.

You can ‘unsubscribe’ from all of their updates OR you can simply receive ‘only important’ updates.

Either way, they’ll never know that you’ve adjusted your settings and you don’t have to unfriend them and risk hurting their feelings.

Recently, Facebook made some changes to their homepage. These changes have limited who will appear in your Live Feed.

Here’s a way to adjust your settings and pick and choose who you see.

1. Click on “View Live Feed” at the top of the page

2. Scroll down to the bottom of your Live Feed and click the “Edit Options” link

3. Change the number of people shown from the (new) default of 250 to the max of 5000.

If you don’t see the window where you can adjust the amount of people, it’s because you’re not viewing your Live Feed.

Go back up to the top of the page and click on “View Live Feed”. Repeat step #2 and #3.

Voilà!