March 2009

March 30, 2009

Updates to the New Facebook Home Page

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote two posts about using the new Facebook home page, since a lot of functionality had changed from the previous version.

Since the launch, Facebook has responded to some of their users' comments (aka complaints) with some minor changes, so I'm going to point out the ones that have changed from what I had written earlier. (Unfortunately, they have yet to address some of the more serious flaws, like removing a person's current status line from the top of the page and eliminating friending info from the News Feed.)

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Read, Send, and Share Tweets on Facebook

When I was doing my series on Facebook last week, I mentioned that I had wanted to do a post about synching different social media sites. Well, I've been doing some research into the various options and have discovered that there's so much out there that it would be impossible to write a single entry about it all. So instead I'm going to write individual posts about the different options available.

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Bug Alert: Hiding/Unhiding Friends in Facebook Using Internet Explorer

Update 04/22/09: This unhiding bug seems to be a bit of a moving target, so I've written a post that consolidates all the possible fixes I've found to date (as well as how it's supposed to work in the first place): http://www.techforluddites.com/2009/04/the-latest-on-how-to-unhide-friends-on-facebook.html.

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Reader Question: Restricting Access to Wall Posts on Facebook

Reader Lorna recently sent me this question: "Do you know if there is a way to direct your news/status updates to only a select group of Facebook friends, as you can with other Facebook apps? My daughter has lots of very casual Facebook friends but a core of 'real' friends. She would prefer that the things she writes on her wall go only to the 'real' friends. Any way to do this?"

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Privacy Controls in Facebook Pt. 1

One of the concerns a lot of people express when they've decided to join Facebook is about protecting their privacy. Kids don't want their parents to see their party pictures; employees don't want their bosses to read their not-always-flattering comments about their companies; teachers don't want their students to know about their personal lives.

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Create Friend Lists on Facebook

I didn't even know about this feature until recently, but it's a really useful one that's become even more valuable with the addition of filters to the home page.

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Memo to Facebook: Put Friending Info Back on the Home Page

In yesterday's post, I said that Facebook's new home page has changed its news feed so that all of your friends' activities are now posted in real time. I had thought the new feed included all the same types of info as the old one. I was wrong.

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Using the New Facebook Home Page Pt. 2

In my introduction to the new News Feed, I mentioned that it could be a bit overwhelming and showed how you can hide the posts from specific friends. Today, I'm going to talk about another helpful way to manage the stream.

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Using the New Facebook Home Page Pt. 1

Well. It looks like Mark Zuckerberg and his band of wacky Facebook developers have done it again. A mere 8 months after the last redesign of the site--one which launched a level of wrath not seen since the introduction of New Coke--they decided it would be a good idea to force their users to learn an entirely new system of navigating their home page.

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Reader Question re. Twitter: How To Retweet

Reader Melanie recently sent me this question:"I'm wondering whether there are etiquette rules around retweeting. I often see tweets I think my tweeps might enjoy but don't want to offend by doing it incorrectly."

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