This is what my Facebook homepage looks like now:

Pretty, huh? No ads, no Farmville updates, no events I won’t attend, no checkins I don’t care about, no so-and-so likes this and so-and-so is now friends with someone I don’t know.

I’m using Better Facebook and I love it. Better Facebook is a third-party plugin that lets you filter your News Feed and make it more like an RSS reader where you can mark items as read.

I have tabs for brands I “like” for research reasons, one for news (New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, etc.) and several for actions I consider clutter (updates about profile photo changes, pages that people like, etc.). This leaves the “Home” tab for the News Feed items I’m more likely to care about.

With Better Facebook, you can filter out certain applications or create tabs for specific friends. It even lets you create a tab for a specific term. So if you want to see what your friends are saying about what is happening “tonight” or don’t want to miss any announcements about friends getting “engaged,” you can have a feed to highlight those posts.

This does take some time to organize to your liking, but in the end, it will make your Facebook browsing more efficient and more rewarding. It seems people’s biggest complaint about Facebook is that it has gotten overwhelming. Better Facebook will help you manage it all and focus on the aspects you really care about.

Download here.