I've noticed in the last year or so that facebook doesn't work anymore for me. I'd txt a few days after sending a party invite on facebook and people'd be like, what invite? I think facebook got filled with too much noise.
I agree, I need to search between 200 notifications about quizzes, games, etc etc and I miss "important" things about my friends. That's sad because I want to know what my friends are doing or what they did, not if they have reached level X in farmville or what's their "Photo of the day".
Friend Lists and hiding Applications basically removes this pain completely. Block every crap application that appears in the field (takes about 3 seconds) and now I don't see any of that shit.