How to put duct tape over the Facebook sidebar

March 2009 update: Since the launch of the Facebook home page redesign, this tutorial will probably not work any longer.

If you watched the “25 Things I Hate About Facebook” video featured in our very first post, you know Julian Smith was considering putting a piece of duct tape over the Facebook sidebar, to hide the “People You May (Not) Know”. Paul, a motion designer and sidebar disliker, has put words into action and wrote a script that actually covers the Facebook sidebar with duct tape without your screen getting sticky.

The script just requires Firefox and Stylish, a Firefox add-on. It will hide all the sections in the sidebar, including requests, application shortcuts, the friends inviter and friends finder, pokes, events and birthdays, and of course the people you may know. Be aware that when activated, the script makes the sidebar unclickable and thus useless, but you can easily toggle it off and on whenever desired.

1. Open Firefox.
2. Install the Stylish add-on.
3. Restart Firefox.
4. Load the Facebook Duct Tape user script into Stylish (38 installs at the time of writing).
5. Visit Facebook.com (toggle it off and on again via the Stylish icon in the Firefox status bar).

Note: The user script can also be used in combination with Greasemonkey or Opera.

We made a short video tutorial on how to add the Facebook Duct Tape script to Firefox: