Photo Credit:  “Scott Beale / Laughing Squid”

Needless to say Facebook, the biggest and most popular online social network with over 400 million users and 300 billion monthly page views, wouldn’t be where it is without offering people a lot more than just a communication tool.

With the introduction of a more advanced API, the Facebook Markup Language and, more importantly, Facebook apps, they made sure that there will be plenty of things to Read more

By now, everyone has already heard of Facebook, the biggest social network online. Chances are high, you already have an account that you created because you wanted to communicate with your friends or other people.

The default Facebook interface was created to be good enough and easy to use for all people, from tech-savvy kids to grandmothers and grandfathers that have never touched a computer in their life. But, of course, the developers can’t create a design that would suit everyone perfectly, because everyone has different taste and ways of thinking.

Besides, with a database of over 400 million active users (and growing at a rapid rate!), it would be impossible to even try it. But there is another way of personalizing the Facebook interface to your liking: do it on your computer!

You see, the Facebook and any other interfaces are just lines of code transmitted through cable from their servers to your computer. Your computer’s browser then creates and displays the page as it is supposed to be from the code.

Knowing this, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that you could “intercept” that code before it gets transformed and modify it to your liking. This is exactly what the developers of the so called Greasemonkey scripts intended and successfully created.

You just install a plugin for your browser, which will then run any kind of scripts that can modify any pages and interfaces to any kind of degree. You can, for example, combine Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the same page, watch Youtube videos while chatting, completely change the colors and layout of everything on a site, and do a lot of other things. It’s all up to you, your imagination and coding skills or availability of already made scripts.

So, let’s take a look at a few Greasemonkey scripts that can significantly enhance your Facebook experience.

Facebook Fixer.

This is a very neat script that allows you to customize your Facebook account and give you a lot of new possibilities like the ability to hide various sections on the home page, use large images in the profile and album, integrate Google Calendar with Facebook and sync all the important dates (like birthdays, meetings, etc.), and much more.

Get Facebook Fixer here.

Better Facebook.

A script that is very similar to the above one, Better Facebook does what its name says: makes Facebook better. It achieves that by allowing you to have more control over your stories and personalization options. It adds new useful buttons, menus, sections and also notifies you when someone unfriends you.

So you are looking to build a better Facebook, get this script here.

Facebook Ads Remover.

This is a great script that does what its name says. Some may think that it would be better to leave the ads on, to support Facebook, and I would normally agree, but with all the scams that are showing up lately, I think it’s better to just completely disable them, at least for a while, until they sort it out and start enforcing stricter rules for advertisers.

Convinced? Click here to read more and get this useful script.

Unfriend Finder.

This script checks your friends lists every time you log in, informs you when someone unfriended you and also tells you why. It doesn’t give a real definite answer, though. There are only 2 possible reasons why someone would be removed from a friends list on Facebook: either they manually removed you or you removed them or they deleted their Facebook account (which is pretty hard to do, by the way) and are no longer on the network (the script will also inform you if and when they ever get back).

Get Unfriend Finder here.

Facebook Purity.

A nice script that helps you clean up your Facebook account’s main page and remove all of the useless stuff like the news feeds from Farmville, Mafia Wars and other games. It also lets you remove the sometimes annoying constant announcements of somebody friending someone, somebody joining a group or event and other information that you may not care about. You can also opt to block a few other things like photo tags, status comments or event postings.

Like to have this? click here to get Facebook Purity.

TinyURLs Decoder.

This script works not only on Facebook, but also on Twitter and any other site that has URL’s shortened with the most popular URL shortening services (like TinyURL, Bit.ly, U.nu and others).

While these services are useful and save space, sometimes you can fall into very nasty traps like pages with viruses, Trojans, porn, phishing sites that can steal your passwords and other unwanted things. This script replaces any tiny URLs with the real address, so you can have a better understanding of what to expect and decide whether to click or not.

Click here to get this useful script.

Facebook Auto Poke.

If you get a lot of pokes, you can find it tiring to poke them back manually. This is where this script comes in very handy: it automatically pokes back any pokes on your home page. Very simple, effective and useful. Click here to visit Facebook Auto Poke.

There are tons of other useful scripts on a lot of different sites. The best way to find them is by using Google or Bing and enter “Greasemonkey scripts for [site or web application you want]”, and you’ll definitely find a lot of them. You just have to try them out to see how powerful and useful they can be.