The recent changes by the Facebook development team have caused a couple of glitches in the site. One of them is that all new friend notices are appearing in our news feeds, which makes them look like this:

I'm glad to see my friends making connections, because that makes my extended network bigger. But for any Facebook user who has more than a couple of hundred friends, these notices can quickly overwhelm the news feeds and bury what's really important -- status updates, links, photos and video.

The 'Hide' button doesn't work in this situation. I'm sure the Facebook team is working on a fix for this, but in the meantime, here's what we can do:

1. From your Facebook home page, click on Settings (upper right on the top menu bar), then Privacy Settings. Click on News Feed and Wall, then make sure the box that says 'Add a Friend' is unchecked, and click the Save Changes button.
   
   This will stop your new friend notices from going out to your friend's feeds. We also need to let your friends know to make these same changes.
   
   
   
2. For your ActiveRain contacts, feel free to reblog this post. For your Facebook friends, copy and paste this status update to your own status:
   
   With the new Facebook changes, your stream can fill up with posts of people adding friends. To stop filling your friends streams with this go to: Settings --> Privacy Settings --> Newsfeed and Wall. Uncheck 'Add a friend.' Please share this tip.

Hopefully the Facebook team will have this resolved quickly. In the meantime, these simple steps can help us manage our news feeds so that we're getting the information we really want to see.