Mr. Tunes

How To Cut Down on Facebook Notification Spam

Events are one of the most frustrating features of Facebook for me. Why? Because as much as I don’t like the amount of emails that come in through the day, I found that turning off the notifications led to me missing a lot of events. And I don’t blame my friends and promoters for this behaviour: Facebook makes it really easy to send out invites.

However, after a small interruption like an email from Facebook, it can often take five minutes to get back on task, and sometimes as long as fifteen minutes!

At one time I was toying around with gmail filters, but all it takes is for me to click All Mail and i’m looking the time suckers straight in the eye again.

Well I finally found a cool service called NutshellMail, powered by the famous newsletter service Constant Contact, which can help us find the best of both worlds here.

The way it works is simple! You plug in your Facebook, Twitter or MySpace accounts into the system, and it batches all the updates into digest emails for you, at intervals you decide.

It can even summarize all activity on the news feeds, but I found that kind of unnecessary. I was about to stop using the service altogether until I realized it was holding on to a golden nugget: Events summaries.

All you have to do is turn off every section in your update, except for the really critical ones. In this case I am including the Events, and then i’ll go over to the maze of Facebook settings and turn the notifications for that one off.

NutshellMail’s settings

Facebook: Account —> Account Settings —> Notifications

I can imagine people who are more popular than me will want to do the same setup for friend requests.

While we’re here, another use of this service for Twitter could be when someone starts following you, or when they @reply to you.

Now instead of babysitting both of these websites ten or more times a day, you can just do it once or twice at times that don’t interfere with your priorities.

Always keep a lookout for services that help you cut down on interruptions, and free up more time to work on what matters most: your music!

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