Thanks to our friends at AllFacebook, we came across a Google Chrome Extension today, that allows you to pre-emptively block certain content from being displayed on your Twitter stream or Facebook News Feed. It’s called Silencer and has been designed to mute the theme of the posts, rather that the post creators themselves.
Silencer users can add the browser plugin and then enter the phrases, names or hashtags that they don’t want to see, and Chrome will hide any content matching those criteria from users’ Twitter streams or Facebook News Feeds.
As you can seen, examples of why you’d want to use Silencer tend to focus around not seeing posts from friends that might reveal spoilers for TV programmes, so silencing terms such a ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Mad Men’ would hide any tweets or updates that might give away plot details.
Other uses might be to quieten down friends who also use their personal Facebook profiles to promote a business instead of utilising Facebook Pages, so that you don’t have to block them altogether and potentially miss out on an important social happening. Just silence a keyword that identifies what you don’t want to hear about and carry on using Facebook and Twitter as normal. You can also unhide content with a single click, so nothing is ever deleted.
One drawback that I have found in trying Silencer today is that you have to reconfigure the plugin on every tab that you open within Chrome, so this might become a bit of an inconvenience for some. Also, it just needs one momentary lapse of concentration for you to inadvertently see what you were trying to avoid.
However, it is better than nothing, so if you’d like to try it out for yourself just add the Google Chrome Silencer plugin and start hiding those posts!
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