First, find the news feed that you want to hide, and click on the application link at the bottom. (See image for an example.)

Clicking on the link will bring you to the Facebook page of the application. Click on the ‘Block Application’ link.

A dialog box will appear to confirm if you really want to block the application. Just click on the ‘Block [app name]‘ button to block the application entirely. Now all the updates related to that application will disappear from your news feed.

Unfortunately, you have to do it for every application that you want to hide from your news feed. Imagine the horror of going to the page of every quiz application and blocking it one by one. I wish that there is an easier way to do it. Hell, there used to be an easier way to do it, but Facebook removed that feature a few months back. We have to wait for Facebook developers to overhaul the layout once more.

Paging Facebook: Can’t you provide a link on the news feed update instead? It’s tiring to go to the Facebook page every time I want to block an application.

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But I like what I’ve seen so far, even if I encounter bugs every so often. Bryan created this game gadget called Pick-up Sticks, and I find myself refreshing the game each time I get stuck with whatever I’m doing. It gets exciting if a lot of people are playing it simultaneously. We played it so much, we ended up getting “wavelet too large” errors. Aw.

Another side effect of trying out Google Wave: I now find regular chat to be too slow. Seeing the character-by-character edits can really make things a lot faster, because sometimes I can already figure out what the other party is thinking even before he/she finishes typing the message. Some people might be too conscious with their spelling, but I don’t mind at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in a country where they don’t speak English that well.

I discovered that Google Wave works best with Google Chrome. (Geez, I wonder why?) I find it too slow with Firefox, and it really gets on my nerves when I tried opening those huge public waves. My friend uses Safari, and she had problems with loading the Pick-up Sticks gadget. Forget Internet Explorer, even the Google Wave team gave up on that one.

I can’t wait to start using Google Wave for collaboration. But to do that, first my adviser has to get a Google Wave account. Also, I need true LaTeX integration. By “true” LaTeX integration, I mean that we would type in the wave just like how we usually begin our LaTeX documents, and there’s a gadget or a robot that allows us to see a preview of our LaTeX output. I wonder if this is possible? So far, all that Google Wave can do is to replace the equations encoded in LaTeX with images (via the robot Watexy).

Preview of the Watexy robot. You have to add it as a contact to make it work.

And since it is a lot more fun to test Google Wave instead of doing work, I am now trying the WordPress plugin Wavr. So here is a test wave embedded in WordPress:

Happy waving!

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I was impressed with the new Inbox, for it is a lot cleaner than the previous ones. It reminds me a bit of Wikispaces. It is now a lot easier to view your contacts, and you now have the option to choose your favorite contacts. What for? For easy access to his or her updates, of course. And wow, you now have easy access to all of your personal messages. Nice.

They also added the Media Locker tab. This contains your shared photos and videos, and it is a lot easier to edit your albums with this new layout. This tab also contains a list of all of your posts, and I noticed that they made it easier to change the privacy settings of your posts. And it appears that if you change the privacy settings, your post will not appear on other people’s inbox. This was a big problem of the previous versions of Multiply, usually leading to a flood of posts from a person who made his old entries private. Also, you can easily create photo books, calendars, cards and prints from your Media Locker. It’s not free, though.

Another new feature they added is the Custom Filter. You can have easy access to all of your posts, posts you have replied on, your subscribed posts, and you can even flag your posts with this new feature. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to create a custom filter.

If you want to see the posts from your high school batchmates, for example, you have to type the names of the individuals you want to include in this filter. I was hoping that they would adopt what they did with the Saved List feature, where you have a list of all of your contacts and you select the individuals by clicking on the names.

Another new feature they added is the Quick Note, which is similar to the Facebook status or to a Plurk or a Twitter. Turns out that they revived and repackaged the Note feature. I already forgot they had this, I was surprised to find notes I’ve written five years ago. But before, the notes have titles and contents like your usual blog entries. (This is probably the reason why I stopped using notes, since I end up posting my notes as blog entries.) Now, the notes are similar to tweets or plurks. Microblogging in Multiply! But I am annoyed with the way Multiply displays these notes in the site. Compare the following notes, one written a few hours ago (Multiply 4.0) and the other written almost 3 years ago (pre-Multiply 4.0):

Call me OC, but isn’t it annoying to see just a title with no content?

EDIT: Ah, now I found the dividing line between new updates and the updates you’ve read since your last visit. They made it smaller so it is easy to miss. I wish they just used the old one, though. Or at least, make this divider a bit more visible.

Anyway, I like the changes they made in Multiply 4.0 (aside from the minor annoyances I mentioned). This is the only social network I belong to where I know everyone in my Contacts list. They still require you to join Multiply to add comments, but I don’t mind.

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