Ways to keep Facebook status updates invisble.

If you are a Facebook user who didn't use a lot of discretion when accepting someone as a friend or just no longer want to have some members' status updates visible to you and find it akward to defriend them, there are some options.To make someone statu update invisible to you, all you have to do is place your mouse over his or her name and wait for a light blue X to appear on the right upper corner of the update. By clicking on the X, you will be presented with three options: Hide, Mark as spasm, or Cancel. If you choose Hide, that person's updates will never be visible to you again. To keep someone from reading your updates, a multiple steps process is needed and here is the walk through offered by the New York Times: After writing an update, look for the lock-shaped icon below and to the right of the text input box. Click on the lock, and Facebook will pop up a menu. Click the bottom option, Customize. That will pop up a dialog box labeled Custom Privacy that lets you filter who will see your update.
There are two ways to exclude people. The quick and easy way is to type their names into the box labeled “Hide this from these people” at the bottom
of the dialog box. To hide all future updates from these people, click the check box at the very bottom that says “Make this my default setting.” Then click the big blue Save Setting button. From now on, evil Charlie won’t get your updates.
The more sophisticated solution is to replace this blacklist with a list of people you do like. That way you can accept any number of new friends without having to accidentally share your updates with them.
To do this, click on Friends in the left margin of Facebook’s interface. You’ll see a button at the top of the Friends page labeled “+ Create a List”. Click that and use the dialog box that pops up to make a list of the friends you want to share with. Call it, say, True Friends.
Next time you post an update, follow the instructions above to bring up the Customize dialog box. But instead of typing into the “Hide this” field, click the menu at the top labeled “Make this visible to these people.” Select the option Specific People. A text input box will appear. Type the name of your new list, True Friends, into this field. Click “Make this my default setting” and then Save Setting. From now on, only your True Friends list will see your updates.

For more, see NewYorkTimes.com