If you want to block anyone just from seeing you online on Facebook IM or Facebook Chat, follow these steps (Accurate as of 6/3/2010):
1. With your Facebook page open (and logged in). Click on Account | Edit Friends. (Upper right hand corner of the screen)
2. Click the button that says “Create New List”
3. A box will open that says “Create New List” and asks you to enter a name. Type “Blocked IM Friends”. (You can put anything you want…you’re the only one who will see this name)
4. Under that box you can type the person’s name or you can select them in the list below. You can add multiple people.
5. When you’ve selected the Friends you want to block, click on the button that says “Create List”.
6. Now that you’ve created a list and added people to it, you need to block that list on Facebook chat. Do this by clicking the Chat button in the lower right hand corner of your Facebook page. You should see the name of the List you just created with a green oval next to it. Click on that green oval (it will turn gray) and everyone in that group will stop being able to when you are online for IM. You can turn it back on at any time by clicking the oval again.
You can create other groups like this as well. I have groups for co-workers, high school friends, etc. You can also use these same lists when you post just about anything to include or specifically exclude friends (or groups of friends) from seeing that post.
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said on Thursday that it was de-friending South Korea on the popular social networking site, Facebook, while the South conducted a large naval drill in a show of force after the sinking of one of its warships.
The sudden de-friending occurs among increased tensions between the two neighboring countries.
When 21-year-old Bath University student “KJ” fell into the river Avon and drowned in 2009, his Facebook page remained. As news of the death spread, rest-in-peace messages started to appear on his wall.
One of KJ’s closest friends had heard of Facebook’s “Memorialisation” feature, which allows existing friends continued access but blocks new ones and removes information such as contact details.
He wrote to Facebook with proof of death and asked for this to be done.
Friends now continue to write on the wall, even a year after the death.
Facebook’s European Director of Public Policy, Richard Allan describes this as “a new form of mourning”.
Since Google launched Google Buzz, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around their strategy. One of the first public (Buzzes? Buzzez? Buzz’s?) I received was from Jeff Pulver, who posted a rather “wait and see” opinion on Buzz…
“Feeling a little buzz around me. It will be interesting to see how this platform evolves. Seems like another piece in the items which will help define the future of how we communicate using non-telephony platforms.” – Jeff Pulver via Buzz.
This prompted a flurry of other comments, including:
Joel Mark Witt - I’m loving Buzz. It is bringing the conversation to me… in my Gmail inbox … where I live most of the time.
geo GELLER - i am not sure this is not another distraction and too landlocked in email – its not twitter – its your email list which is nice but but but and further more hmmm
I commented on the similarity to FriendFeed and how I felt like my Gmail inbox was starting to become almost as forgotten as MySpace (or Orkut!)
Part of the conversation included a discussion of how people are linked up in Buzz. Google apparently has been autoconnecting Buzz profiles to other Buzz users based on who’s already in your Google Contacts list and this is causing a bit of a stir in the privacy world…
Anyway…I agree with Jeff and certainly think the Buzz has some growing to do. It’s already much more user-friendly and easier to grasp than Google Wave (I wonder how many Waves there are about Buzz?). Picasa provides photo sharing…Google chat is already integrated. And if you integrate Google voice, then you have AudioBoo functionality as well. Connect your Twitter and Facebook feeds, and suddenly Google is your social networking glue. They should’ve called it Gluegle.
Buzz might just be Google’s secret back door into social networking.
Oh, and if you’re trying to figure out how to get started with Google Buzz….go here: http://www.google.com/buzz
There’s an increasing breakdown of the traditional social boundaries between workplace and homelife, and personal and public information.
Let’s say a Facebook user in England sues another user in Australia for defamatory comments posted on the site. Who has jurisdiction over the case, which country’s laws should be applied: England’s, Australia’s or those of the United States, where Facebook is based?
I wrote a post about this a while ago, and it’s been quite popular. Facebook has recently changed things again and everyone’s in a tizzy about it. Here’s some ways to get your Facebook news feed looking like it used to look:
OPTION 1: Increase the number of Friends in your feed
The new default newsfeed on Facebook puts a heavy emphasis on what’s popular. How does Facebook know what’s popular? It counts comments and “likes” and puts those posts at the top of your feed. Additionally, by default, it only puts 25o of your friends in your feed. To change this, follow these steps:
Go to your HOME page. Make sure you are in “View Live Feed” mode.
Scroll all to the bottom of your screen, click “Edit Options.”
You will then see an optionfor “number of friends.” Change the 250 to 5000 for Facebook’s friend limit.
If you have a lot of friends, increasing this number to 5000 will greatly improve your default newsfeed.
OPTION 2: Change your Default Feed to only show friends Status Updates
On the menu at the top left (right under the Facebook logo), click on MORE.
Find STATUS UPDATES and drag it to the top, above NEWS FEED.
After dragging it to the top, click on it. Now your default feed will only show status updates. You can switch to the other modes just by clicking.
Microsoft has reached collaboration agreements with Twitter and Facebook to get their members’ public status updates and messages indexed and presented in useful ways on the Bing search engine.
The partnership with Twitter has it working with Microsoft to optimize how Bing crawls and indexes “tweets.” Microsoft in turn will apply search algorithms to the Twitter messages, so that Bing users will not only be able to see a real-time feed of “tweets” but also rank them by how relevant they are to their query..
Rob Volpe from Howl at the Moon and The Orlando Show joins the Crew again and talks about Lonely Island’s “I’m On A Boat”, Diggz pranks his Facebook Status, and talks about attending the Hitchens/DeSousa religion debate at UCF and much more.
UPDATE: 24 hours later and I’m extremely pleased. They did a great job with this app, and I’ve noticed an uptick in traffic.
I’m always on the lookout for ways to make my life easier. No longer than 5 minutes had past after I posted about MySpace Twitter integration (including a note about how I use the RSS Facebook import feature to import my blog into Facebook Notes), did I see a post from one of my Facebook friends regarding NetworkedBlogs.
The last time I looked at bringing this blog into Facebook was about 6 months ago. I looked at several 3rd party apps, Wordpress plugins, Facebook Connect…but none of them did what I wanted.
So I settled on the RSS import function of Facebook’s Notes application. Which did just fine. It’s a little slow on the import (maybe once an hour at best), and it never brought in any embedded content correctly (so if I ever just posted a video without an accompanying link, the post would just look blank).
Enter NetworkedBlogs. They claim they’ll promote my blog to 400,000 users and solve my Facebook connect problem at the same time. I have installed it and this is the first post I’m trying. Let me know what you think.
Thursday, June 3
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