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Top 25 Facebook Tricks you may not have Heard of

How much do you use Facebook? Every day? Would you consider yourself an expert? It’s true that we do spend a lot of time on Facebook, but surprisingly, a lot of users still don’t completely take advantage of all the features it has to offer.

To help you make the most of your Facebook experience, I’m going to go into depth explaining the best hidden Facebook tricks currently available, such as forwarding messages, organizing contacts in lists, viewing your profile the way another contact sees it, joining and using groups specifically made for your college and its students, and controlling who sees what you’re tagged in by your friends.

1. 1. How To Place Facebook Chat On Firefox Sidebar

      If you are using Firefox, you can place the Facebook Chat at the sidebar.
      
   2. FacePAD: Facebook Photo Album Downloader allows you to download your friends’ facebook albums, Events albums, and Group Albums, en masse, with the click of a button.
      
   3. Flickr2Facebook is an unofficial Flickr to Facebook uploader(bookmarklet) which allows you upload photos to Facebook from Flickr.
      
   4. hellotxt and Ping.fm both introduced features that let Facebook administrators update Facebook Pages.
      
   5. Sendible lets you schedule Facebook messages ahead of time so you can send messages to your friends, customers or colleagues in the future.
      
   6. A short tutorial on Makeuseof to guide you how to hide Facebook status updates and keep that fact confined to your closer friends.
      
   7. Click on Friends tab. Proceed to More tab. From "Choose an option" dropdown, choose any of the dashes "—" . Your Facebook friends collage is right on your computer screen.
      
   8. This service has been discontinued. X-Friends is a unique tool for tracking friends that disappear from Facebook.
      
   9. A little-known feature in Facebook that lets you decide who shows up in that Friends box. Click that "edit" pencil in your Friends box and type the names of your best friends in the box that says "Always show these friends"
      
   10. This Greasemonkey script – Facebook: Cleaner removes many of the annoying ads and updates that unavoidably appear on your Facebook pages.
       
   11. OutSync is a free Windows application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to select which contacts are updated. So you can update all contacts at once or just a few at a time.
       
   12. The following method make use of Facebook status feed and WordPress RSS widget to display Facebook Statuses on WordPress blog.. It will also work for self-host WordPress blogs.
       
   13. Wordbook allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts.
       
   14. Gabtastik and digsby let you keep Facebook chat sessions open on your Windows desktop outside of your regular web browser, using minimal screen real estate and system memory.
       
   15. LOLapps provides quiz creator that can be employed to conjure up these popular personality quizzes that are so widespread in Facebook.
       
   16. Facebook has integrated friends list with Chat and you can also choose which of these list members get to see you online.
       
   17. NutshellMail consolidates your Facebook accounts through the inbox you use the most.
       
   18. FireStatus is a status update utility for multiple social networks, including FaceBook.
       
   19. Seesmic Desktop, Facebooker, Xobni, Facebook Sidebar Gadget, Scrapboy and Facebook AIR application are desktop applications that allows you interact with your stream just as you would on Facebook, but without the browser.
       
   20. A simple guide to terminate, delete or cancel Facebook account, together with the Facebook profile easily.
       
       
       

       The simple way to share messages between different parties is copy and paste. Right? Maybe not. Conversations can be difficult to select in the right place. It also can be quite tedious whenever you want to quickly edit the conversation so that it’s easy to read and follow. Thankfully, Facebook has addressed the issue with message forwarding, allowing you to easily share any part of a conversation.

       

       The process is simple. With the desired conversation open, click “Actions” and then“Forward…”

       

       You’ll be prompted to select which messages you would like to send. Do this by checking the boxes next to each message. Click the blue “Forward” button in the yellow banner at the top and send your message to anyone you desire. You can also add your own comments to the conversation as seen in the image below.

       It is important to note that you should always get the permission from the other friend whose messages you’re forwarding. It’s the courteous thing to do.

       As you may already know, Facebook has a “lists” feature, which allows you to sort contacts, or do you? If you do know about the feature, do you use it? A quick survey I conducted with 104 people resulted in 72 percent not using this feature. 10 percent said they use only the lists provided by Facebook to organize their friends and 17 percent said they use the provided lists and also make some of their own. Only 27 percent of those who were surveyed are using Facebook lists. That seems quite low to me. However, with that said, Facebook doesn’t make it very simple to organize your contacts, nor do they really explain the benefits of doing so.

       I’ll quickly explain the benefit that Facebook lists can be. If you’re at all like me, you probably have connections from several aspects of your life – work, school, family, different organizations, church, friends and people you’ve met through your friends. At the very least, it’s nice to know how those people fit into your life. Sure you may think you can remember them all, but once in a while we all run across someone in our newsfeed that we have to stop and ask ourselves “Who is this person again?” That alone should be reason enough to organize your contacts.

       However, you can also create specific newsfeeds for certain people or topics, instead of just seeing everything. Probably the most useful trick with lists, though, is the ability to filter out posts and direct them to certain categories of friends. This can be helpful if you don’t want to annoy fellow co-workers with the vast amount of YouTube videos that you made and posted on your profile for your close friends to see.

       This is a good time to quickly point out that you should never post anything on the Internet that you don’t want everyone to see. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t direct it to specific audiences, but save yourself some embarrassment and don’t post about that crazy party last night and call in sick on the same day — even if the post is “hidden” from your boss and co-workers. Remember those mutual friends of yours and your boss’s that were tagged in your post? Busted.

       

       To create a Facebook contact list, click on “Friends” on the left sidebar. You’ll likely see some lists already there — those are the ones Facebook has provided for you. The lists include places you’ve worked, gone to school, family, close friends and acquaintances, to name a few. This is a good place to start, but if you want to make a custom list of your own you can click the button “Create List.” Then just name the list and add the people you want.

       Even if you don’t want to go back through all your contacts to add them to lists right now, be sure to start with the new contacts that you acquire and immediately add them to a list. This ensures that you don’t forget any newly added ones as you begin your Facebook list adventure.

       Ever wonder what your profile looks like to the public eye or even a specific person?  The “View As…” feature allows you to do just that. Beneath the bottom right corner of your cover photo, there is a small gear-shaped button (also next to the “Activity Log” button). When clicked, a menu with the option to see your profile how others see it drops down. Click “View As…” and you’ll see your profile change in appearance.

       This is also a nice security feature to see just how much the public sees on your profile. You may end up wanting to change a thing or two that you didn’t know were visible to the public eye.

       

       Remember back when Facebook was only for college students and you needed an EDU email address to even use it? So, what ever happened to that?

       Once Facebook opened to the public, all that college student exclusivity vanished. That feature is now back though with even more features and uses to make your college and Facebook experience even better. To see if your college or university group has already been created on Facebook, go to Groups for Schools.

       

       Facebook will automatically detect what college group you belong in based on your EDU email address that you’ve registered with Facebook. To do this, simply add it to your contact information and Facebook will take care of the rest. In these groups, there are endless possibilities to interact with fellow students. It’s a great way to meet fellow students who may share the same interests, which is often hard to do at large universities.

       No! Your friends did it again! They tagged you in that horrendous photo. Needless to say, this happens all the time. In fact, I’ve even done it as a prank to a friend because I knew they didn’t have this feature enabled. So how can you control tagging?

       First off, always be aware of where you go in person. I’m referring to real life here. If you think what you’re doing may end up on Facebook and you aren’t sure all your contacts would approve, maybe you should think twice.

       But let’s say you just want a little more control over what shows up on your profile. Personally, this is a big issue for me as I don’t have an Internet-enabled phone so I can’t promptly access Facebook. There are a few features that allow you to approve what posts are submitted to your profile by others and which ones aren’t.

       

       Just like any other of the privacy and security settings, which I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with, the tagging controls are accessed through “Privacy Settings” in the drop down menu of the top right corner of the page. Once you’re there, select custom and then click the “Edit Settings” link under the “Timeline and Tagging” section.

       

       The window features several settings to adjust how others interact with you on Facebook publicly. On the third line, you can turn on the option to review posts that friends tag you in prior to it appearing on your timeline. You can also set the option to review tags that friends set to your own posts and also who can see posts that you’ve been tagged in as well as just any posts that friends post on your profile.

       Something important to note is that these settings can be much more beneficial if you also have your friends categorized into lists. This is because if you do want to customize the settings beyond all of your friends seeing posts or being able to post, you can allow or prevent specific lists of friends from being able to interact with you publicly.

       As Facebook continues to grow, so do its features. Currently, I see these as the most helpful features at the time, but if you feel there is one (or more) that I missed, let us know in the comments below how you use it to improve your Facebook experience. What is the most useful Facebook feature for you?

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Titanium Backup : Complete guide ;-)

Titanium Backup is the ultimate app of choice for every avid Android user with a rooted device.

We’ll start off with what any novice user would when installing Titanium Backup for the first time. If you’re here, your device is probably already rooted.

Titanium Backup can seem intimidating to the first timers, but the app is actually quite simple to use once you know your way around it, and that’s exactly what we’re here to do. The app is available as an unpaid version and a paid one, that is Titanium Backup Pro, with the latter offering some advanced features that will be discussed later on.

Good, so you have Titanium Backup installed, now how do you backup your apps? Simple, hit the Backup / Restore tab as seen in the screenshot above and you should see a screen somewhat similar to the one below. The apps with their icons visible are the one’s that are already installed on your system, and the ones that are crossed out, are those that have been backed up, but not yet installed.

But what’s with the creepy smilies, the excalmatory marks and all? Tap the Menu button on your device and hit the Legend tab. You will be shown a screen similar to the one below, listing all the symbols and what they actually mean.

Right , so you’re in the Backup/Restore menu. To backup any particular app, simply tap it and a sub menu like the one below, will pop up. No need to go all Dee Dee on Dexter here, stick to what you were here for. Hit the Backup button and leave. Please note that you can only have a single backup for every app in the unpaid version of Titanium Backup. Now that you know how to backup an app, here’s how to restore an already backed up app. Simply tap on an app (yes the crossed out ones) and when the sub menu appears, hit the Restore button to restore that app. You will be asked whether to restore the app alone, or the app with its data. Take a pick. In some cases, restoring an app with data may cause the app to become corrupt or force close, especially when you have moved from one ROM to an entirely different ROM. In such cases, try restoring the app alone, without the data.

It is advised that if and when you do make a backup of system apps and settings, do not restore them on a totally different ROM. For example, do not restore system apps backed up in MIUI on a HTC Sense based ROM unless you want a mess on your hands. In all likelihood, the ROM will act up.

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the Backup and Restore option, it should be safe to tell you thatWipe Data removes all the relevant data associated with that app and Un-install does exactly what it says. If you want to remove a particular backup of any app, hit the delete button. This will remove any backup of the app along with its data from your device. Freeze (Only available with Titanium Backup Pro) is a very useful option that lets you freeze up any app that you don’t want deleted, but don’t exactly want it to be running either. This option is handy for use with system apps mostly, that run unannounced and in cases where a certain app drains a lot of battery. If you’re not sure you want to delete them, you can at least stop them from running constantly in the background.

The above Backup and Restore options are all good for a few apps, what about when you have, say, a hundred of them or even more? It would be cruel if we had to go through the tap to backup process for each app one by one. Luckily, for sanity’s sake, the developers included a Batch Backup / Restorefeature. Batch operations are split into 9 categories including Backup, Restore, Backup Verification, Move / Integrate, Freeze / Defrost (Pro version only), Manipulate Data, Un-install and Delete Backups.

Something different to app backup and restore is the Move / Integrate feature, which allows you to move all your apps to the SD card in batch. Coming back to batch backup and restore, here’s how you can backup all of your apps with just one tap. Hit Menu -> Batch to bring up the batch operations menu, then select RUN with the backup type of your choice. In our case, we chose Backup all user apps and were taken to a screen as shown below (on the left). You will be asked if you want to exclude backing up the apps that are active or kill them to back them up. Select the apps that you want, or just hit Select all, and once the choice is made, hit the Run the batch operation button on the top.

As for batch restore, here’s what will make you want to purchase the Pro version. Hit the Restore type of your choice, in our case we chose Restore missing apps with data. Select the apps and choose whether you want to restore the data as well. Hit the Run the batch operation button and voila! The restoration has started. “Uh oh, it took me to the app installation screen! Is that normal?”. Unfortunately, yes it is. The free version of Titanium Backup is not so hot on restoring your apps for you. You will have to install and then hit the done tab for every app being restored in succession. Frankly, it is a pain! The Pro version lets you restore your apps in a batch as any normal batch operation should, be it 10 apps, 300 or even more.

So we’re done with the backup and restore operations but Titanium Backup has not yet run out of tricks. Did you know that you could send a list of all the apps currently installed on your PC via Bluetooth or email? Hit the Menu button on your device and tap More to bring up a list of options. Select Send Dataand the screenshots pretty much say the rest.

You can also schedule when to backup your apps and system data. Even better, you can set multiple schedules. Hit the Schedules tab on the main screen and now you can add new schedules, or simply edit or remove existing ones. This can be pretty handy for times when you haven’t exactly backed up your recent apps and some custom ROM decides to go all Kung Fu on you or if you’re just forgetful. With Schedules, you can rest assure that your apps will remain safe in times like these.

There are also a couple of other nifty options if you go into the Preferences menu of Titanium Backup. If you have the Pro version, you could enable the use of Dropbox with Titanium Backup and have a cloud based backup of all your apps. Those paranoid about the safety of their backups can have an encrypted backup, but this feature, again, is for the Pro version only. By default, Titanium Backup saves all your backups in a folder named TitaniumBackup on the root of your SD card. You can change that by going into Backup folder location. If you have ever been through the backed up contents in the TitaniumBackup folder, you would have noticed how the files aren’t exactly the APK’s one would assume they would be. Instead the contents are compressed, but you can change that. Even more, you can change the compression level or choose not to compress the backup at all.

If you have the Pro version, your maximum history of a backup for each app is increased to 5! You can change the default maximum history from 1 to 5 from the Preferences menu.

One more handy feature is the Filter. Adding a filter makes finding an app from a list of hundreds very easy. Simply hit the Menu button on your device and tap the Filters button (or simply hit the Search button on your device). That said, try keeping a listed app pressed, and menu similar to the one below on the right will pop up. If the app is already backed up, you can send the backup via email or Bluetooth (Pro version only). Moreover, you can convert the app to a system app or choose to enable multiple profiles for the app (again, Pro version only) and much more.

Lastly, if you want, you can create an installable zip file of Titanium Backup to be installed via a customRecovery. Go to More and hit Create “update.zip”… to be taken to a screen similar to he one shown below. Choose the Script type wisely, use the newer Edify script if you’re on ClockworkMod recovery 3+ or the older Amend script for ClockworkMod recovery 2. You can choose whether to install Titanium Backup as a system or user application. Select the name type and hit the Create “update.zip”… button to create the file.

This concludes our attempt in helping out Android users intimidated by Titanium Backup. Hopefully, we acquainted you with a few features you had not tried out before. If this guide helped you out in any way, or if you feel something has been left out, do let us know. Market links to Titanium Backup and Titanium Backup Pro are given below.

Pro

Free

Download Titanium Backup

Download Titanium Backup Pro

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