Want a cleaner, less Farmville-filled Facebook experience? Try loading your friends’ and fan pages’ status updates, links, notes, and other material into an RSS reader. Facebook doesn’t make it easy, but it can be done with some clever URL copying.

LiveJournal user Jamie Zawinski details the steps needed to pull the vast majority of Facebook material you’d (theoretically) want to see into an RSS reader like Google Reader or NetNewsWire. In most cases, it involves heading to the right page for your friends’ Posts, Notes, and Notifications, looking in the right-hand sidebar box, and grabbing the feed URL for “My Friends’ [Whatever].” In the case of status updates, which is what you really would want to grab from Facebook, it requires a little URL tweaking of one of the above feeds, explained at Jamie’s post.

The real benefit to using Facebook in a feed reader? You avoid exposure to Mafia Wars, Farmville, and all that other application cruft, and get just the raw details on what your contacts are up to. You also, unfortunately, miss out on updates about your friends’ photo album updates, for reasons unknown to anyone but Facebook’s coders, but it might well be worth it for those who find visiting the social networking site’s actual page a cluttered experience.