You follow a couple of people on Twitter who are big fans of cricket and thus, whenever there’s a game happening anywhere in the world, your Twitter timeline gets flooded with tweets that are of least interest to you.

That’s just one example but there are plenty of other sources that add noise to your Twitter timeline – some people may be broadcasting their location through Foursquare, iPhone users do the same with Instagram pictures and then there’s the Royal Wedding happening that may have completely hijacked your Twitter feed.

Don’t you sometimes wish there were a mute button on Twitter that would let you temporarily block people from your timeline without having to unfollow them?

Some Twitter apps – Tweetdeck for example – allow you to create simple text filters (you can access them from settings) to help you hide tweets that either contain certain words, match an #hashtag or have been written by particular people.

However if you are not using any app but the regular Twitter.com website, you should check out Slipstream – a super useful extension for Google Chrome that cleans up your Twitter timeline automatically as you like.

Once the extension is installed, you’ll find a new hide link next to all tweets on the Twitter website. You can click this link to define a new filter which may be something like hide tweets that contain the word #FF. Save the filter and you’ll never see another Follow Friday tweet in your timeline again.

Alternatively, you may also leave the text criteria blank and that will hide all future tweets from that particular user (just like the Mute button you were looking for). You can always disable / delete existing filters from the options menu. Simple!

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