Streamline Your Facebook Experience
Posted by Melissa Wiley in Reviews on Monday, March 08, 2010 10:00 AM
Fire up your Facebook pages! I’ve been invited to guest-blog here at Faith and Family Live this week to talk about social media. Thanks, Danielle, for having me!
Recently, the sudden arrival of Google Buzz threw many Gmail users for a loop — especially mothers like me who were surprised to discover our children’s names and comments showing up on our Buzz pages, right there for all the world to see. Buzz’s initial privacy flaws have been addressed now, following a storm of negative feedback, but it was a good lesson for all of us in just how easy it is to unwittingly reveal personal information on social networks.
This week I’d like to take a look at some of my favorite social networks and talk about their pros and cons, with a special focus on how to protect our privacy.
First up, Facebook. I am an unabashed Facebook lover, though I have my grumbles about it as well. And while I understand why it doesn’t appeal to everyone, I am grateful for the renewed and reinforced connections Facebook has provided me. I’m now in daily touch with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, nieces and nephews, and old friends scattered around the globe. My father is there (with my mom peeking over his shoulder), and one of my two sisters. (I really wish my other sis would get on board!) My hubby is there too, and many of our college friends, which makes for some lively comment threads. Far from being a superficial time-waster, Facebook has been a source of meaningful connection for my family.
But it still drives me crazy sometimes. Facebook takes some tweaking or it can quickly become a blur of cartoon hugs and Farmville notices (even if you never play Farmville).
Tomorrow we’ll look at Facebook’s privacy settings. Today, here are a few tips for navigating Facebook and narrowing down the stream of content so that you only see what you want to see.
What’s a news feed, anyway?
When you log into Facebook, you land on your Home screen: two narrow sidebars and a wide center column. The center column is labeled NEWS FEED. The News Feed is—well, to be honest, what it is is ANNOYING. I never use it. It pulls in updates from a limited number of your Facebook friends, selected randomly, I think. Bah. What if my daddy never makes the random cut?
So what I do is switch to the Status Updates display.
1) Click on “Friends” in the left sidebar. (A few lines below your profile picture.)
2) Click on “Status Updates.”
Ah, that’s better. Now I can see what you’re all up to.
You can also create groupings of your Facebook friends and read the latest status updates for specific groups—say, family, high school friends, college friends, local friends.
1) To create a group, click “Friends” again.
2) Center column, top right: click “Create List.”
After you’ve selected friends for the list, the name of the group will show up under that Friends tab from now on. (You might need to click the More button.) Maybe you like to check your family’s status updates every day, but you’re trying to manage your online time wisely and you’ve decided to save catching up with old friends for Saturdays. (Just an example.)
What I like even better than the stream of status updates is clicking through to individual friends’ profile pages. Of course I can only visit a couple of friends this way each day—but it’s fun to catch up on a day or two in their lives all at once.
Now let’s go back to the Status Updates display. Occasionally you might find yourself with a Facebook friend whose updates you’d rather not read. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it in a mean way. Suppose your friend the widget maker is at a widgetmaking conference and is live-tweeting a panel discussion on the Postmodern Hermeneutics of Qualitative Widgetification. Her Twitter stream is set to feed into her Facebook updates, and, well, you love her but you just don’t find widgets all that gripping. What you can do is temporarily hide her updates.
Hover your cursor over the right side of the center column, just to the right of a status update. A little hide button will pop up. If you click it, her updates will disappear from your stream.
How to un-hide her after the Conference of Widgetosity is (mercifully) over:
1) Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and look for Edit Options in the center column.
2) Click that and a box will pop up, with the caption: “The following streams are hidden from your News Feed. Click ‘Add to News Feed’ to see their posts again.”
Easy-peasy!
You can also hide Applications. This is very, very, very important for maintaining Facebook sanity. If you are being driven crazy by notices about Mafia Wars, Farmville, or any other game or application, simply hover your mouse to the right of the notice until your best friend, the Hide button, appears.
There. Doesn’t it feel good to declutter? Now I can relax and enjoy the news and photos from the people I love. Looks like my dad snapped some amazing shots of a hawk in his backyard today.
Next up: protecting your privacy on Facebook.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
