The Facebook-platform game FarmVille has 80 million players. It's been named social networking game of the year. It's played by people young and old. It's bigger than Twitter. But that doesn't mean it's for everyone.

The game optionally advertises itself by sending out news feed updates to your friends whenever you accomplish a milestone with your farm or character. When you have lots of friends playing FarmVille, those updates can be ubiquitous enough to drive you a little crazy.

Here we'll save your sanity by showing you how to hide all those FarmVille news feed updates and notifications without burning any bridges with your passionate social gamer friends.

Hiding Friends' FarmVille News Feed Updates







This task is simple. Any time you see a FarmVille update in your news feed, move the mouse cursor to the right of the update and a "Hide" button will appear as seen above. Click on it.







As illustrated above, you'll then be given the choice to either hide that friend or just the FarmVille app. Since you probably want to keep seeing your friend's updates (we hope), click "Hide FarmVille." This will hide FarmVille news feed posts from all your friends, not just the one who published that particular update.

Blocking FarmVille Notifications







Sometimes friends will send you notifications inviting you to join them in FarmVille or other games. These can be annoying if you're not interested in playing. The easiest way to take care of this is to click the "x" next to the notification when you receive to block the FarmVille application.

But if you want to do this preemptively without waiting for another notification, just search for the FarmVille application using the Facebook search bar, go to the application page, and look for the "Block Application" link directly below the application image. We've included a pic above so you'll know what you're looking for.

Clicking that and confirming will prevent FarmVille from accessing your information or sending you notifications, but it won't hide news feed updates from friends.