Rihards Online

Ah Facebook, the biggest and arguably best social network out there. Most people use it as it is without knowing much about it, so to enlighten you all a little here’s a compiled list of things you might not know about Facebook yet.

1. Some Basic Info
Facebook is a privately owned company with its headquarters in California, Ireland and South Korea. Its founder and CEO is Mark Zuckerberg. Currently it serves over 300 million users and that number is increasing quickly.

With 900 employees across the world it’s estimated that Facebook makes more than 300 million USD in revenues per year.

2. Always show these friends
On your profile page you can make it so that specific friends will always be displayed in your friends box. To do so, click on the little pencil icon next to “Friends”. You can also adjust how many friends the box will show. Information box has some interesting settings as well, should you for example want your website to be displayed on your profile as well.

3. Friends lists
Most of you probably already know about friends lists. But did you know that you can put the same friend in multiple lists? Or that each list can have its own privacy policies? You could easily make it so that people in certain lists can’t access your photos/videos/information about you. This is very handy for those people who like to add a lot of people because of applications.

Did you also know that you can hide your online status from specific friends lists as well? Just click the little “Go Offline” icon next to the list’s name.

4. Remove yourself from Facebook search results
Should you want not to be found on Facebook’s search, you need to go to the Search Privacy page and change the “Search Visibility” option to whatever suits you more. You could limit it for example only to your Friend’s Friends and your Networks. If you only want your current friends to be able to find you then set this to “Only Friends”.

5. Photo albums and Privacy
If you want to keep certain photo albums private it’s very easy to do. And you should always think about the photos that you share with “Everyone”. Because when it says “Everyone”, Facebook does mean everyone. Complete strangers can get access to these photos. So be sure to always select the appropriate “Who can see this” privacy setting when creating/editing albums.

Do also keep in mind that even if you don’t care if strangers can see your photos, the other people on your photos might not like that.

6. Photos Tagged of You
Most of you have no doubt already experienced this. Someone uploaded their photos of you at a party and they look less than flattering. On top of that, they tagged you and now all your friends have seen it. So how do you prevent this? Quite easy, it’s just a setting on the Profile Privacy page. Look for “Photos Tagged of You” and select “Customize…”.

7. Privacy in general
There are many more privacy settings and pages, so be sure to go through them all if your privacy matters to you, and it should. Many people overlook this and leave the privacy settings at their default values which are quite guest/stranger friendly.

8. Importing your blog
If you have a blog somewhere else which you regularly update and would like to post these blogs on Facebook automatically there are several ways to do this. The easiest to use is Facebook Notes which has support for importing your blog entries as Facebook notes.

Some blogging software, for example WordPress has plugins which will post your blog entries as well. These generally come with more options and can be customized to your wishes should the Facebook note importing not be good enough for you.

9. Firefox and Facebook
Firefox currently has more than 60 Facebook related addons. Some of them more useful than others obviously. There are addons which allow you to save Facebook videos, addons which give you a Facebook toolbar, addons that download entire Facebook Photo Albums, and so on.

10. Special Facebook chat emoticons
In addition to the standard emoticons Facebook chat also has some special ones and it would seem most people still don’t know about them. So how do I use those emoticons? Quite simple (without the quotes):

For a full list of emoticons and explanation behind them (like what’s the deal with :putnam:) have a look at the following site that is dedicated entirely to Facebook emoticons.