Apparently that's Awesome Mod story progression. I always thought the brown houses were friends of the active sim. I don't know why they only sometimes show. I don't recall if they can be turned off, I'll ask Pescado. NRAAS has 'Tagger' which allows you to assign tags, but don't know if they can unassign them or whether that would cause a conflict between the control mods.
ETA: Those tags are brown to me so that's where some confusion arose.
The
houses are households the active sim knows. Orange (that's orange) tags with sim faces are missions. Under certain circumstances the tags may also be red (low-detail mode, I forget what this ultimately means) or yellow (sacred). I've never seen them blue.
Orange household tags I do get but I believe thats in the original game.
Missions? what do you mean by that?
I get red taggers if I activate the tracker on that sim personally, blue I'm not sure why it became blue but all sims in the family saw the tagger as orange, but one who saw it as blue.