Tag: Facebook

Facebook Annoyances – “Happening Now”

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Facebook has recently rolled out something called “Happening Now” to my Facebook profile, and I find it exceptionally irritating because this is even more detailed than my news feed. Now, I have a scrolling update not just on what my friends have posted, what they comment on, what they liked, when they have been tagged etc, I am also “informed” when they have posted a comment to their own photos or wall comments – even on matters and things which my interest goes as just taking a look most of the time. It is even more irritating when I get “informed” of things I may have clicked on the ‘X’ to hide it so I won’t ever see them again. After all, if I was interested in keeping track of a particular wall post, note or picture, I would have “liked” them or made a comment so that I will automatically get an update when anything get posted on those!

That’s not all. The Facebook chat feature which I have always turned off, now keeps popping up “tempting” me to try it whenever I refresh the Facebook page. It just won’t go away even after I have turned it off. Sort of like a toggle switch which after you have turned off the lights to your bathroom automatically turns the light back on the moment you walk past it. Utterly irritating, isn’t it?

Has Facebook run out of ideas? Why do I need something similar to a Twitter feed inside Facebook or a more detailed version of the traditional Facebook News Feed? I am already unhappy I don’t have a detailed enough filter to automatically eliminate stuff I didn’t want to see! The worst part of it all is that I can’t even disable it and in the case of the chat, it refused to “remember” I had. Even if all these are just for trial, I want the option to be able to disable it. I hate it not only because it is feeding things I don’t want, but because it is also making a decision for me by assuming that I would like it and not providing me the option to disable it.

I searched in Google and found nothing on how I can disable it. My friend Joey mentioned that he only managed to get rid of it after he gave Facebook feedback. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy option for me to give feedback quickly. I ain’t going to navigate through several pages only to find a feedback page when I do not know when someone will act on it. I simply want to be able to just click something and make it go away, pronto!


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So instead of wasting my time searching in Google to find where I can bring up Facebook’s feedback page, I continued searching on Google to find out how I can disable it. It was a futile search and only after I changed the search parameters that I found F.B. Purity – a script which I can install in the browser (only Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Opera supported) so I can rid of all those irritating junk that Facebook has been adding over the years in the sidebar – for e.g. advertisements, sponsors etc. All of this is done with a few clicks, but it still doesn’t vanquish the irritating feeds from “Happening Now”. Arrgghhhh!!

I was about to uninstall it when I decided to give it one last look. I went back to the site and did a search for “Happening Now” and apparently there are suggestions on what I can do to disable it. Unfortunately, the suggested solution didn’t work, but it gave me ideas. Since I don’t really care about what shows up on the right sidebar anyway (including pokes, or birthday notifications because I get an email every week informing of upcoming birthdays), I decided I could disable it completely.


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So I added what a small piece of ‘code’ into the Custom CSS box in F.B. Purity and viola… the entire sidebar was gone! I can once and for all vanquish all these nonsense I have been forced to live with as and when I wanted to. It even come with a custom text filter which I have always been asking for but never getting from Facebook. I haven’t yet tested it but I am glad it exists. There’s a slight drawback on any other browser other than FireFox, however. While it worked on all Facebook pages (even apps.facebook.com) on FireFox, it doesn’t work beyond the newsfeed page on the rest of the support browsers (such as Google Chrome). I don’t mind because that is good enough since I am usually on the News Feed page most of the time.

Frankly, I rarely whine about Facebook and its boo-boos, even when at one point of time it rolled back the privacy settings of my friends and caused some misunderstanding between us. I also didn’t made fuss when Facebook credit suddenly became the only “currency” that is accepted in Facebook games – which means whatever credits I bought for the games suddenly become almost worthless overnight. All I had to say was that Facebook credits was not a new idea anyway since qq.com had implement the QQ Coin [QQ 币] for several years. It made me wonder why it took so long to actually implement it. Perhaps they had a hard time arm twisting the game makers into accepting it because of the cut they are making out of this.

All I want to say is, there’s only so much nonsense users can take even though the service is provided more or less for free. I know Facebook rarely gives a damn about our complaints or feedback much like the Singapore government in the past, but with Google+ users may no longer take this shit lying down.

Addendum (23-Sep-2011)

F.B. Purity has released several updates since I first made this post. They have included a feature to easily turn off the ticker without the need to add those ‘difficult’ CSS codes. (See screen shot below)

Anti-Social Media – Facebook Friend Lists

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An active user on Facebook would inevitably gather a large number of friends. Yet not all friends will share the same opinion with the user or even one another. So at times the wall postings end up a common battleground between friends on a different end of the divide. It also become a chore to do damage control and peace keeper among friends, and it becomes annoying and time wasting when certain idiots incessantly rant on without getting the point in ‘agreeing to disagree’ or ‘just shut up and shove it up the other end of their alimentary canal’.

Fortunately, with privacy settings and ‘friend lists’, you can now create lists so certain exceptionally pesky individuals can be shut out of your wall posts, or target wall posts and specific users. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate how to create ‘friend lists’, and how to manipulate the privacy settings in Facebook to deny your wall posts to certain users, or to deliver them to a group specifically.

This is exceptionally useful if you can’t stop yourself from the urge to say something about your colleagues or your employer, which might later come back to haunt you later or cause you to lose your job. Personally speaking, I would prefer no one say anything about his work on social media platforms be it Facebook or any micro-blogging facilities like Plurk or Twitter. After all, there is no reason to take the risk that Facebook won’t make certain changes which have the drastic effects of exposing stuff previously hidden from certain groups or individuals.

1. Click on “Account” on top right corner in Facebook, then select ‘Edit Friends’. This will load the ‘Friend Page’.
2. The ‘Friend Page’ is where Facebook recommend people to add as friends (usually friends of other friends), or where you can search the address books of Yahoo, Windows Live Mail etc for friends. Any list created will be on the left sidebar on the ‘Friends Page’. A truncated example of mine show here.
3. Assuming there were no list already created, click ‘Friends’ on the left sidebar to have all your friends listed. ‘Friends’ is the first item under ‘Lists’ on the left sidebar. When the browser finish loading the first page of friends, the following will appear on the top of the list (see below.)

Click to proceed with creating a new list.
4. A small window appears inside your browser. Give your list a name and select the contacts for this list and click ‘Create List’ when done.
5. The name of the list just created will appear on the sidebar. Click it to list check who are listed. Beside the names of contacts in the list, it will also indicate how many other list they are already in.
6. Having create all the lists required, click Home on the top right corner to return your feeds page. Then click in the box for add links or to input the status. Immediately below the input box, a set of icons will appear on the left, and small ‘Lock’ icon and the ‘Share’ button will appear on the right.
7. To shows default privacy settings, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon.
8. Click on ‘Lock’ icon and select ‘Custom’ to edit settings
9. Example: This is what I do if this wall posting should only be visible to the list named ‘Premier Soccer’ but hidden from ‘Island Paradise’. Do not that you do not have to type the full name of the list. Facebook will suggest it as you type in more letters.

To hide from a list is to explicitly deny it from viewing this particular wall post.

Click ‘Save Setting’ when you are done on who can and cannot view this wall posting.
10. To confirm list visibility before posting, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon again. Click ‘Share’ after you are sure this is what you intended.
11. To identify the a wall post’s visibility setting after it has been posted, look at the information displayed under it.

The example on the right shows the information displayed beneath a wall post visible to everyone. (Note: No ‘Lock’ icon at all!)
The example below shows the information of a wall post with visibility settings. Mouse over the lock to show visibility settings.(Note: Except indicate the list which this particular wall post is hidden from.)

Here’s a crazy idea that I thought up when discussing the above matter with a friend. Assuming that your girlfriend does not like you partying with a group of friends, you can now create a list for your girlfriend and mutual friends, and one for the partying gang. In your Facebook profile, you can then still share photos and comments with your otherwise ‘not approved’ activities with your partying gang without your girlfriend knowing.

Isn’t that cool?

Odd Messages on Facebook

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I am seeing quite a number of these today in Facebook (see screen capture).

First, it appears as some of my friends status message, and subsequently these friends start spamming my wall with the message. And when I checked back with these friends what’s so interesting about this site, they first expressed surprise and ignorance, before they disavowed of having done so. In fact, in all cases, they are adamant they didn’t log-on to Facebook to send those messages. (i.e. the status will show it was update 30 minutes ago, but this friend hasn’t even log in to Facebook for days!)

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the URL in Firefox and it led me to a site selling some kind of dried plant and I suspect it’s probably some kind of weed like marijuana. However, please refrain from visiting the site (especially with IE), not because of what it is touting, but a simple precaution against any possible ActiveX ‘niceties’ and malware that might be hiding behind it.

Anyway, I am not very sure if those friends’ accounts were hacked to send these messages. The one friend I managed to convince to check out his Facebook account, said his password was not changed and he could still access his Facebook account. For good measure, he changed his password and I see that those messages have stopped. But for some of the others, I see an increasing number of walls of mutual friends getting spammed with this message.

I could think of one possibility how something else can gain access to your password for whatever nefarious purposes. A scam which says it could reveal those blocked you on MSN Live Messenger has been making its rounds on the net previously and many have been fooled. Once a person tried checking on who has blocked them through this site, those on their contact list will receive a message touting this site, or links to dubious and questionable sites at random times. I suspect that if one has used the same ID – usually one’s Hotmail / Microsoft Live Mail email address – and password to sign up to Facebook, and have not changed their password since, then that same information could now be exploited by the same scammers.

Whatever the case is, I would suggest that if you have been using a simple alpha-numeric password to login to any kind of online services, to change it and increase it’s complexity. A password like Passw0rd is definitely not good enough. You might want to consider a complex password like P@s5w0Rd+ instead.

Of course, the most important thing is to remember not to sign on to some completely unrelated site on the wild Internet with a password belonging to another service, simply because the site appears to offer you something in return. In short, if www.kennasai.com says it could reveal to you who has blocked or deleted you on MSN Messenger, it’s simply common sense to ask just how www.kennasai.com is going to obtain that information from one of Microsoft’s servers.