Donn King's Corner

In “It’s a small world after all, part 1,” we talked about how social media connects people in ways that weren’t possible until recently, and focused especially on Twitter. In this post, we continue the conversation.

Through Facebook I have connected more solidly with my friends

Thanks to Facebook, I have reconnected with old friends from high school and college that I haven’t seen for nearly 40 years, and I get to socialize with current friends much more than I otherwise would, since everyone is always on the run and time for “real world” socializing is short. I have also found some folks who share professional interests, but Facebook is mainly about fun and socializing for me.

Though it took me a year to start using it, up until about last October it was the social medium I turned to most. I connect with co-workers here, but more on a “water cooler” level–valuable, but a different sort of thing than the other two services we’re considering here. Read more »

A friend has asked me to point her once again to the page on Facebook that tells you how to make sure you are seeing all your friends’ posts. The page I had shared earlier to FB friends was an event (since events always show on Friends’ pages, it’s a backdoor way to make sure something gets posted, but once the “date” for the event has passed, it no longer shows), so it was no longer accessible for me to point to. So I’m posting a simplified version here, which will remain good until the next time Facebook changes its code–which could be in the next five minutes.

In one of their latest updates (“It’s a feature, not a bug”) Facebook’s defaults have left you not seeing posts from friends if you haven’t “liked” or commented on one of their posts in awhile. There are a lot of my friends whose posts I very much enjoy reading, but I don’t click the “like” button or comment on. I would prefer to be the one to decide which posts I want to see.

I’ll add to the standard “how to” though by telling you about a plugin I use to take even more control of my FB reading experience. It’s called BetterFacebook. It’s not for the faint of heart, since it gives you lots of options for changing the way Facebook works, and if you install it you will have to figure on updating it whenever Facebook code changes and the BetterFacebook developer responds.

I’ll just say I find it worthwhile. Among other things, BetterFacebook lets me sort incoming posts onto tabs according to category (if I wanted to see all those Farmville posts, for instance, I could segregate them all onto a Farmville tab, making them easier to see, and making all the other posts easier to see). The main thing, as far as I’m concerned, is that I can mark posts as read, making it easy to see what’s new.

It also has filtering capabilities, which can be helpful if you have lots of people on your Friends list that you don’t really know all that well. Otherwise, processing all the messages from FB can be like trying to process a firehose.

Even if you don’t use BetterFacebook, though, making sure you see every post appeals to most people I talk with, and making it like that takes a couple of steps.

First, while reading Facebook, change the setting at the top from “Top News” to “Most Recent.” Under the old way of doing things (if I understood it correctly), this was basically all you had to do to make sure you saw all posts from all your friends. With the upgrade, you will see a lot more stuff by changing to “Most Recent,” but you still won’t see everything. For that, you still have some tweaking to do.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page (it might load some more posts before it will actually let you do that) and click on “Edit options.” (It’s possible you’ll have to do this on the “Top News” view, but currently it works on either view.) That will bring up a dialog where you can change the settings that you need to.

At this point, just change the drop-down menu so it selects “All of your friends and pages.” Remember to click “Save,” and you’ll be all set. Of course, you can switch back at any time it gets to be too much for you, but generally I would rather be the one deciding to skim through over skip over messages than to leave it to Facebook’s algorithm.

Elizabeth Bernstein shares observations with implications for modern communication in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “How Facebook Can Ruin Your Friendships.” Do you see implications for your own use of online social media?

Friends know that I’m about as close to Web secure as you can get without being flat-out paranoid. I’ve hardly ever gotten a virus, despite doing a lot of exploration. I have effective email filters set up, and I’m adept at spotting those emails that appear to come from people are know, but really aren’t, i.e., spoofed.

Nevertheless, the only thing that never changes is that things change. I’m being tested right now via Facebook. I’m pointing to this post from there, in fact, as a fuller explanation for my FB friends, and also as a general warning to everyone else. Here’s the background, and the potential benefit to readers. Read more »