20 Unknown Facebook tips

If you are a regular or even a casual Face book surfer then it is very likely that you are quite acquainted with the usual features of adding as well as deleting friends, getting the status up to date, setting wall papers, creating and editing profiles, looking at other pages within the site as well as other applications. However, there is more to this wonderful site as you will discover below.

We cover some of the other features that you can find of use in the site and these could be the ones that have not been well talked or written about. You will find them very convenient to remain better linked to all your friends. So here’s presenting 20 Face book tips as well as tricks that should come as a surprise to you. After going through them, if you have anything more or new to contribute, please feel free to do so and you can make use of the comment box at the bottom of the page for this purpose.

1) FACE BOOK CHAT FEATURE ON MOZILLA FIREFOX SIDEBAR

If you are a user of Firefox, then you can position the chat feature of Face book conveniently on the side bar as shown below in the screen shot. Unfortunately, this only seems to work for Mac users. Look for Bookmarks on the top navigation. Select Organize Bookmarks. Click New Bookmark tab and enter the following:
• Name: Facebook Chat
• Location: http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php
• Check Load this bookmark in sidebar.
Launch the Firefox sidebar, click Facebook Chat and start chatting with your Facebook contacts within Firefox.

2) DOWNLOAD YOUR FACEBOOK ALBUMS

The very easy to use FacePad application enables you to download every photograph sitting inside the albums of your friend’s face book account pretty easily by just clicking a button. Look at the screen shot attached to get a good understanding of how to do it.

3) SHARE FLICKR PHOTOGRAPHS WITH FACEBOOK

The Flickr2Facebook is yet another easy application that allows you to get the photos in Flickr to your Face book account. Just follow the directions pasted in the screen shot below to know how to do that.

4) UPDATING FACEBOOK WITHOUT ENTERING FACEBOOK

The screen shot below shows you two features in the form of hellotxt as well as Ping.fm which can be used by Face book administrators to complete the task of updating Face book pages.

5) SCHEDULING YOUR FACEBOOK MESSAGES

By using Sendible, you would be able to schedule and prepare your messages you want to send to your pals, office colleagues and even customers much ahead of time. This will save you precious time and you can easily send the messages thus prepared and scheduled at the required moment.

6) HIDE YOUR 'NEW FRIEND' STATUS UPDATES

For those who add new friends that you don't want others to know about, you can choose to hide this status update through Makeuseof. You can set who gets to see your new friend status updates. , you would be able to conceal any Face book status update and ensure that this is known only to your very close pals.

7) CREATE PHOTO COLLAGES USING YOUR PICTURES

All you need to do is first click on the Friends tab, which will take you to the More tab. Here, you need to select the “Choose an option” feature and then select any of the dashes “----“ given there. You will immediately see the collage of your choice on the screen consisting of photos of the various Face book friends.

 FIND OUT WHO HAS BLOCKED YOUR MESSAGES OR HAVE DELETED YOU AS A FRIEND

Want to know who was once your friend but no more? Try X-Friends, a tool that helps you keep track of pals who suddenly disappear and are no longer seen on Facebook.

9) CHOOSE THE PHOTOGRAPHS YOU WANT DISPLAYED ON THE PROFILE PAGE

By making use of a feature on Facebook that is still not well known as shown in the screen shot below, you can actually select specific photographs that should appear in the Friends box. All you need to do is to just select the “edit” pencil showing in the box and then type the various names of pals whose photos you want to appear in the box. This option will ensure the display of only those photos.

10) ELIMINATING ANNOYING ADVERTISEMENTS

You can make use of the Facebook Cleaner to completely eliminate all the irritating ads as well as unwanted updates that keep surfacing on your account as shown below.

11) SYNCHRONIZE YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS PHOTOS WITH THE YOUR MICROSOFT OUTLOOK CONTACTS

A wonderful application known as OutSync is available as a free tool in Windows that will help you synchronize the contacts you have in Microsoft Outlook with that of the photos of your friends in your Face book account. The application enables you to select a single or multiple contacts at the same time for this activity.

12) DISPLAY YOUR FACEBOOK STATUS ON WORDPRESS BLOGS

Utilize the status feed of Facebook and combine it with the Word press RSS widget so that the status is displayed on the blog. This method will work on Word press blogs that are self hosted as well.
Step 1. Under your Facebook Profile, click on 'See All' in the Mini Feed column.
Step 2. Click on 'Status Stories' found under Mini Feed.
Step 3. Scroll to the bottom and look for ‘My Status‘. Copy the link of My Status.
Step 4. Log into your Wordpress control panel, go to Design -> Widget. Look for RSS Widget, add it to your side bar.
Step 5. Paste the copied 'My Status' URL inside, and complete the name before saving the widget. Done!

13) POST YOUR BLOG POSTS AUTOMATICALLY ON YOUR FACEBOOK WALL

The Wordbook application enables you to copy blog posts from your blog to the wall of your Facebook account and when you hit the “Boxes” tab, you will notice even the most recent posts you have written on your blog.

14) ACCESSING THE FACEBOOK CHAT FEATURE ON THE DESKTOP

Two applications Gabtastik as well as digsby will permit you access to your Face book chat without having to use the regular browser and this will be done using very little memory from the system and space on the screen as you can see from the screen shot below.

15) CREATE YOUR OWN FACEBOOK QUIZ

Another wonderful and novel application – the LOLapps gives you the capability of a quiz creator which can be used to make up different and popular quiz questions that are quite popular in Facebook.

16) SELECTIVELY HIDE YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE FROM SPECIFIC CONTACTS

In Facebook you have the facility of a friends list that is integrated with that of chat and this enables you to choose specific members from this list to whom you should be visible.

17) GET ALL RELEVANT FACEBOOK UPDATES IN YOUR EMAIL INBOX

The NutshellMail application does a great job of integrating your Facebook accounts and delivers the updates to the inbox of the email account most frequently used by you.

18) UPDATE YOUR FACEBOOK STATUS THROUGH FIREFOX

By making use of FireStatus, which is a utility application from Firefox for ensuring status updates, you can go ahead and update your status on Face book and other social networking sites.

19) POSITIONING FACEBOOK ON THE DESKTOP

Various applications such as Seesmic Desktop, Xobni, Scrapboy, Facebooker, Facebook AIR and Facebook Sidebar Gadget help you to use Face book on your desktop without the need of the regular browser.

20)EDIT YOUR FACBOOK ACCOUNT AS WELL AS PROFILE

The screen shot below shows how easily you can delete or cancel your account on Facebook and even terminate it along with your profile.

Obama Silicon Meeting

It seems that NBC Bay Area has gotten its hands on what appears to be an official guest list for tonight's Silicon Valley dinner with President Obama.

As you may have already heard, the POTUS will be landing in the Bay Area tonight for a tech meet-up of his own; already-confirmed guests include Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt. However, the dinner table will be packed with other tech CEOs and bigwigs.

See the rumored full guest list just after the break.

• John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Carol Bartz, president and CEO, Yahoo!
• John Chambers, CEO and chairman, Cisco Systems
• Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter
• John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Larry Ellison, cofounder and CEO, Oracle
• Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix
• John Hennessy, president, Stanford University
• Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO, Apple
• Art Levinson, chairman and former CEO, Genentech
• Eric Schmidt, chairman, Google
• Steve Westly, managing partner and founder, The Westly Group
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder, president, and CEO, Facebo

Google Renews Battle Over Facebook Contacts, Removes Phone Directory Sync On Nexus S

As part of today’s roll-out of Gingerbread updates to the Nexus One and Nexus S, Google also took an aggressive jab at Facebook: it has removed the ability of Facebook users to merge their ‘Facebook phone directory’ with the Contacts application on the Nexus S. In doing so Google has rekindled the battle over contacts that it initiated last November, in which Google has argued that Facebook is locking up user data. But before we get into the implications, it’s prudent to explain how things have worked until this point.

Right now when you fire up the Android Facebook application on the Nexus S for the first time, you’re given the option to ‘Sync friends with Contacts’. Enable the feature, and the next time you open your Android address book you’ll see your Facebook contacts — including their phone numbers, assuming they’ve added them to their Facebook profiles — listed alongside the contacts stored in your Google address book. In short, your Facebook and Google contacts are all seamlessly listed in the same place. It’s pretty nice.

But now Google has decided to turn off the feature on the grounds that users can’t export any of their Facebook contact data — they can see it in their address book, but the data isn’t actually stored as part of the phone’s contacts database. Which means that if they ever decide to leave the social network, they’ll find that their phone’s address book is suddenly missing a bunch of contacts and phone numbers.

So, Google has decided to ‘fix’ the problem by preemptively removing the feature before everyone gets too used to it. Here’s their statement:

“We believe it is very important that users are able to control their data. So in the over-the-air update for Nexus S, we have a small change to how Facebook contacts appear on the device. For Nexus S users who downloaded the Facebook app from Android Market, Facebook contacts will no longer appear to be integrated with the Android Contacts app. Since Facebook contacts cannot be exported from the device, the appearance of integration created a false sense of data portability. Facebook contact data will continue to appear within the Facebook app. Like all developers on Android, Facebook is free to use the Android contacts API to truly integrate contacts on the device, which would allow users to have more control over their data. We are removing the special-case handling of Facebook contacts on Nexus S and future lead devices. We continue to believe that reciprocity (the expectation that if information can be imported into a service it should be able to be exported) is an important step toward creating a world of true data liberation — and encourage other websites and app developers to allow users to export their contacts as well.”

You’ll still be able to access this information through the Facebook application, but it will no longer be available in your list of contacts.

Make no mistake: this is a calculated move on Google’s part, and one that has as much to do with spurring another wave of press coverage about Facebook’s siloing of data than it does with concerns over Android address book confusion. And it’s also sort of strange. Google says that Facebook should use the standard Contacts API like every other developer, but it was Google that enabled this functionality in the first place over a year ago, when the Nexus One shipped. Obviously there has been a lot of heated back-and-forth between the two companies since then, and Google may be concerned that users will increasingly start to use Facebook to house contact information and phone numbers when the integration is so seamless.

The reality is that while this will frustrate some Neuxs S users, most Android owners won’t care. The Nexus S only came out in December and caters primarily to early adopters, but the vast majority of Android users are on other devices that won’t see the change. In fact, Google isn’t even making this change on the Nexus One, explaining that because the Nexus One came with Facebook pre-installed, users expect this syncing feature as part of the out-of-box experience. But the Nexus S didn’t come with Facebook pre-installed, so it’s fair game. From a Google spokesperson:

“There will be no change in the way Facebook contacts appear on the Nexus One. Since the Facebook app was preloaded on Nexus One, it created an expectation for users of how the device would function. “

Even if Facebook doesn’t wind up changing its application (and I wouldn’t bet on it), the move makes one thing clear: Google isn’t done with this fight. Don’t be surprised if it takes the opportunity to point out Facebook’s lack of contact export at every opportunity, in the hopes that the general public eventually starts to pay attention.

Update: One thing to note is that Google says this applies to the “Nexus S and future lead devices” — in other words, whatever ‘official’ Android devices it will be releasing down the line. If any of those future releases do catch on with the mass market as opposed to the early adopter crowd, then the removal of this feature could actually impact a lot of people.