1525. Cleaning up Facebook Likes

Since signing up on Facebook a few years ago, I’ve “liked” a large number of pages. At this point, I’d like to like less pages, and clean up some of my “likes.” Is there some easy way to do this without having to dig through all of Facebook?

We saw an article, a while back, about a Facebook user who decided to see what would happen if he “liked” every single thing that Facebook put on his feed for two days. Even if he hated the item, he “liked” it. Just to see. What we didn’t know (and you probably didn’t either) is that Facebook doesn’t just display postings from your friends and “likes”, in sequential order. It’s more devious than that—Facebook uses complex algorithms to determine what you should see on your Facebook feed, and in what order. The order and content is strongly tied to things you have “liked”, and the more you “like”, the more you see. The article is interesting, and here’s a link so you can read it: http://goo.gl/d4uA1Q.

The point is, if you “like” too many pages, you end up seeing all sorts of stuff on your own Facebook feed that you really don’t care about. And this stuff can get in the way of what you’re spending ostensibly useful time doing: tracking your friends and their doings. Or whatever. (Ken says “Go on a Facebook moratorium. It’s a big, fat time suck.” But not everyone agrees.)

But back to the question: If you want to kill your likes en masse, we have found an ingenious, and useful open source tool at this site: http://www.likecleanse.com . The Like Cleanser logs into your Facebook account, presents all your “likes” to you, and allows you “unlike” any or all of them quickly and easily. We’ve both tried it out, and did some pruning along the way. Remember: the pages you’re “unliking” don’t know that you’re no longer a fan, so there’s nothing rude about giving them the old heave ho. And you’ll have more time for the important things in life (that is, anything but Facebook). Check out http://www.likecleanse.com to get rid of the things you thought you liked, but apparently don’t.