Facebook: Changes to the newsfeed filter

Just came across a neat little change on the newsfeed. Previously whenever you would get these annoying updates from spammy applications like "farmville" or "bestfriend" and the likes you could hover your mouse over to the top right corner of the message and a hide button would appear. Clicking on it would allow you to hide that application or hide that particular friend completely.

Now what you have is a hide button, clicking which you get the message " _____ has been hidden from your News Feed..." with an Edit options link. On clicking the Edit link you have options to customize your newsfeed, remove or add friends change the maximum number of messages you get in your feed etc.

This is a step in the right direction. As before there was no way to reduce the number of messages received from some friends with whom you weren't necessarily in touch with. This could lead to further narrowed down filtering options for users to customize the feed. Maybe even to the extent where messages from particular friends which contain certain words should be filtered out. A scenario where this could be useful would be if you have a certain friend who you follow but he msgs excessively about girls or computers then his messages could be filtered by these words.

Hopefully some day there would be an option to export your newsfeed to view it in an external rss reader :P