Facebook may have saved many a friendship when it first introduced the "unfollow" feature, wherein a user can tune someone out completely without the drastic step of unfriending them. But there may be times when you just need a break from someone in your network, but you don't necessarily want to ignore them forever. Facebook hopes to address this need with its newly announced feature, Snooze, coming within the next few days.

Snooze will appear as an option from the top-right drop-down menu of someone's post, and when activated, the user will temporarily unfollow the person for 30 days. Over that time, the user will see neither hide nor hair of the snoozed account. To maintain peace in our time, no one is alerted to the fact that they have been snoozed, and it can be turned off before the 30 days is up.

It's sort of like the Facebook equivalent of pretending to listen to someone on the phone prattle on while you interject random "uh-huhs" and "mhmms" as you wait for them to stop talking. We will have to see how Snooze gets implemented on Facebook's mobile apps versus desktop. Facebook says Snooze contributes to fulfilling its "core News Feed values," a set of noble-sounding and vaguely contradictory principles announced last year, aimed at showing users "the stories most relevant to them." These include the ability to control one's own experience, which sometimes butts up against another core value, that of being a "platform for all ideas."

Well, now Facebook can be a platform for all ideas, except for those of that one friend who's driving you nuts with all the posts about his perfect, happy life and you don't mean to be rude, but you just can't deal. For 30 days, anyway.

PRESS RELEASE

Source: Facebook