Tag: facebook

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Facebook Does It Again

I feel compelled to comment on the new Facebook layout. Based on status updates, I was one of the last people on my friends list to receive the new layout. Every single one of their status updates were negative, all of my Facebook friends universally hated the new layout. It seems like that last redesign only came out a 3 or 4 months ago, I wonder if this might been partially responsible for the backlash. It’s human nature to hate change.

I must say, when I first saw the screenshots of the new layout posted on the official Facebook blog a few weeks ago I was rather optimistic. The FB crew seemed to be embracing the new “real-time” web that’s become popular with the rise of Twitter. I really like the way that all your friends’ updates just appear in one big long list. It’s a major improvement over the old “news feed” which was entirely broken! There would be times when I’d see a “story” 2 times on the same day, or the story would appear one day, then re-appear the next for no apparent reason. It was frustrating.

I haven’t run across it yet, but I imagine they the real-time feed could easily become incredibly busy and equally unusable. The filters along the left-hand side should help to alleviate this problem. But it’s possible that at certain times of the day, for heavy users, there is going to be too much junk to weed through.

I’m really not sure how I feel about the overal design itself. They left the header and (floating) footer alone. Those two elements have have always been the least useful, most confusing elements of the site (like why does the “Inbox” drop down menu have a link to “view message inbox” that takes you to the same place as clicking “inbox” – baffling!). It’s lacking something I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s empty and busy at the same time, if that’s possible.

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Tips & How To's

Thoughts on Online Privacy & How to Protect Yourself [OR How Facebook Can Save Your Identity]

The following is an excerpt of an email I wrote in response to this article Facebook can ruin your life. And so can MySpace, Bebo

A lot of the current batch of social networks have very poorly designed privacy controls. On facebook for instance, it’s very hard to tell which of your contacts have access to different which areas of your profile and it’s not entirely clear how much of this information is accessible via google. In fact, there is a bug in Facebooks’ architecture that will allow any of your friends to see a newsfeed item (not the full post) for all of your activities via the official Facebook API, even if you have set up your account to block certain users from seeing this. Also, facebook is also more closed off then some of the old social networks, so it might not even be clear to most users that their profiles show up on google. Combine all of these factors; bugs, security holes, phishing attacks, user ignorance/naivety and you’ve got a shitstorm waiting to happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next couple of years a big player is completely knocked out of the game by a major attack and the bad press that follows. Not too long ago a file containing nearly 1 million myspace usernames and passwords was making it’s rounds; it went largely unreported, but if a major news outlet had picked it up it would’ve been very bad for myspace.

That said, I think a lot of the people mentioned in this article probably didn’t have great legal representation. Writing a journal entry about how much you hate your job, doesn’t neccessarily mean you’re a bad idea. Making a drunken post about how much of a drunk you are, doesn’t mean much if that’s the only time you’ve had a drink in 6 months. Accidentally adding someone to your friends list on a social network because you didn’t know how to use the interface, is not nearly the same thing as banging on someone’s front door demanding to speak with them.

Interestingly, I’ve found that using my real name on websites/networks is a good way of protecting my online reputation. Social networking and similar sites will generally have much higher weighting in google then the average site – networking type sites are built with search engine optimization in mind. So if you are a member of a number of these types of sites and you post content that you are proud of on a every once in awhile, when someone does a search for your name they will almost always find content that you can vouch for. Additionally, if there is any kind of negative content about you somewhere on the web – say someone has posted something mean about you in their blog, or even worse if articles about your latest criminal conviction in show up in a local newspaper’s website – it is very likely that when a potential employer does a search for your name, your profiles on larger websites will show up before these negative articles on smaller websites.

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Tips & How To's

How To Ignore All Facebook Requests

Now that I have over 100 friends on Facebook, I’ve started to get inundated with ridiculous application requests. I was about ready to send some angry Facebook emails to so called friends. Then I found this greasemonkey script to Ignore ALL Application Requests.

As you can see from this spiffy screenshot the script creates a little button on the right-hand sidebar of Facebook’s notification page.

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Facebook Fix Your News Feed, Seriously

Seriously, 3 out of 5 of the items at the top of my facebook feed right now are from someone on my “Less About These Friends” list.

Why can’t you just give me a list of updates in chronological order?!

#End Mini-Rant

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Google Tips & How To's

Add Facebook Events to Google Calendar, 2 Simple Steps

I just discovered the most amazing, useful mashup. You can automatically add your Facebook events to your Google calendar! This way whenever you accept an event invite it shows up on your google calendar, with all the details! It just takes 2 simple steps.

  1. Pull up your facebook events page, click the “Export Events” link at the top. That brings up a little dialogue box with a URL. Copy that URL.fbevent.png
  2. Open your Google calendar settings page. Click the “Calendars” tab, under “other calendars” click “add calendar, click the “Add By URL” tab. You’ll be presented with a form that’s able to accept the URL you just copied from Facebook!

Voila!
You’ll now see your Facebook events in Google calendar. Thusly, minimizing the amount of websites you have to open to figure out when you have time to visit your mother.