Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with facebook

keeping my life off of Facebook while refusing to be a part of it?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:38:27 -0800

As a Facebook refuser (I've never signed up, never will) is there a best way to monitor any photos or writings that may be linked to my (quite rare) real name? I have a very unique last name, and my combination of $firstname $lastname is shared by fewer than a dozen people in the US, and I'm the only one in my State with this combination.

I don't have any mortal enemies or more/worse skeletons in the closet than the average person my age, but I like to control what is tied to my name, and I'd be pretty pissed off if there was something floating in facebook that I was unaware of that I don't want anyone with a keyboard seeing. At least with Flickr I can search public photos and tags.

I'm not losing any sleep over this, but *other than* signing up for an account, is there anything else I can do? I have a few friends that I guess I could ask to look for me, but does that seem weird? Can photos on FaceBook only be tagged with names that are linked to other FB accounts?

Why doesn't my spouse let me see his/her facebook pictures?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:20:37 -0800

Is this normal? Would you be worried if your spouse blocked you from seeing his/her pictures on facebook? My life partner, let's call him/her LP, blocks me from seeing any pictures on facebook tagged with "LP’s name.” LP has photos, albums posted up on facebook, but has not changed LP's privacy settings to let me see these photos.

I know this because LP and I often spend time together when one of us is on facebook. We'll send each other interesting things we've found when we’re apart, or when we're together, we'll say, "Hey, look at this!" We’ll talk about friends in common, and just generally share our facebook lives like we do our meatspace lives.

We've been partnered up for a long time. LP is, I understand, a private person. And I'm pretty sure that LP is not cheating with someone, or putting up pictures that would be explicit or shocking.

I just don't understand why LP would not allow me to see LP's photos. If LP isn’t having an affair, then this doesn't make sense to me. I've asked LP a number of times why this is the case, and LP has said, "I don't know," or "I'll fix it," or "why does it matter?" This makes me kind of sad, because we both work, and spend many hours each week apart from each other. I think it’s nice and reassuring to be able to pull up a picture of LP in the middle of a typical boring work day.

So this is my question: if your spouse did not let you see your spouse’s photos on facebook, would you think it was weird? Are there any circumstances that would make it seem more or less weird? If you asked your spouse to change this, and your spouse refused, what would you do? I guess it may be obvious that our life partnership is pretty much like most others, with good points and bad points. But that’s probably another question.

So, if you’ve read this far, and if you care, you may feel you need to know more. It’s for you that I’ve set up an email account that you can follow up with me on –
anonymailone-askmefi@yahoo.com.

How do I turn on notifications when someone "Likes" something I wrote in Facebook?

zooropa — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:05:43 -0800

How do I receive notifications when someone "Likes" something I posted on Facebook? Right now, I receive notification when someone replies to something I wrote or writes on my Wall on Facebook. I would like to also receive notification via e-mail when someone clicks "Like" on something I wrote.

I have scoured the Web, and it appears that this is supposed to be a default feature. I'm wondering if I've turned off something by accident. I checked my notifications screen in the Settings, and I have notification turned on for everything (literally). But I'm still not receiving notification.

Am I doing something wrong? Help would be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks.

New facebook privacy

four panels — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:04:06 -0800

New facebook privacy settings. How do you hide friends from Google search results? How do you hide fan "pages" from non-facebook friends? Are these now permanently public?

Annoying Facebook gets annoyinger

idiomatika — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:24:07 -0800

I'm getting lots (I mean lots - over 50 today alone) of phishing/Trojan spam purporting to be from Facebook, asking me to "update my facebook account". How do I stop it? I use Outlook. I've set up numerous rules designed to automatically delete these spam mails as they come in (based on key words in both the originating email addresses and in the message body), but these rules only seem to work intermittently.

It's getting annoying to have to delete them manually when the rules I set up should have worked.

I wouldn't care so much, but they're going to my always-running work address (self-employed, so no clever IT department to do this for me), and its getting quite bothersome.

Am I doing something wrong, or is Outlook just pants?

Administering non-celebrity Facebook pages

total warfare frown — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:26:09 -0800

Does anyone run a Facebook page with a large number of fans? A friend of mine and I set up a page (Not Being Murdered By Clowns) as a goof and were surprised when the number of fans climbed into the tens of thousands. Around the 50,000 fan mark, I received a message from Facebook saying that I needed to prove my affiliation with the subject of the page in question. A tricky proposition, since we made the subject up.

They suggested changing the name of the page to the official web domain. I registered notbeingmurderedbyclowns.com and asked them to change the name of the FB page. That didn't work. They suggested adding a badge or "fan box widget" to the "actor's official website." Obviously this isn't possible. None of their suggestions - get someone affiliated with the alleged celebrity we're a fan of to link to the page, basically - are doable. I don't have anything on the web page I registered yet, and frankly don't have the time to put something together right now.

There are several other "Not Being" pages out there (Not Being On Fire and Not Being Eaten By Sharks are the biggest), but I can't find any contact emails for them, and their info appears even more bogus than ours. My replies to the FB emails have been fruitless as well.

It isn't like we're emotionally invested in this, but we're almost at 80,000 fans and had thought about printing some t-shirts and making a little money off the venture. Now, however, both of our publishing rights have been blocked. Any thoughts?

How can I make my JW videos embeddable and Facebook share-able?

bingo — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:57:52 -0800

How can I make my JW videos embeddable and Facebook share-able? I'm hosting videos on Amazon Cloudfront, and playing them in the JW player on my Wordpress site. I would like to make these videos embeddable, my main interest being to make them share-able on Facebook (which I realize is probably its own ball of wax).

I've found scattered documentation, but nothing that really thoroughly tackles this problem head-on, which, it seems to me, must be common: Wordpress, JW Player, Facebook sharing.

I'm not afraid of a little code, but I do need more direction than I have been able to find, and that includes the Facebook API documentation.

Thanks!

Radio Fa-Fa-Facebook

almostwitty — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:23:56 -0800

I need examples (good and bad) of how radio stations, DJs or programmes use Facebook. Thank you!

Good examples of Social Sign In?

slactoid — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:43:45 -0800

Any good examples of "Social Sign In"? For the little web toys I make, I don't want to make full sign up forms, so I'm looking for any sites that are using Facebook / Twitter / Google / Yahoo / OpenID / etc for sign in. Something like what stack overflow is doing here: http://stackoverflow.com/users/login (only OpenID though).

Mama Gambino

Unred — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:32:35 -0800

My mother spends a good deal of her day playing Mafia Wars and has accumulated hundreds of people she doesn't know on Facebook through the game. She is definitely not street savvy or tech savvy in any way and I'm worried that she may be taken advantage of. I don't play Mafia Wars, but I just don't trust that its taken up such a large part of her life right now. Is it just a way for her to pass the time? Or do I need to be concerned?

RT @mathowie Anybody seen sites that scan cats?

anildash — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:13:48 -0800

Are there good examples of Twitter (or status updates on Facebook) being used to answer questions AskMe-style? Or even better, to collaboratively solve a problem, like when the Scooby Gang here sussed out Kaycee Nicole? Right now, all of the questions & answers I see happening via Twitter replies are mostly opinion/survey questions. While it's interesting to see if people prefer Ginger or Maryann, I'm much more curious about concrete problems being solved using these new, more immediate media. Enlighten me!

Why Should You Use Social Networking at Work?

Jaybo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:06:47 -0800

Many workplaces ban social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and so on. What are some of the reasons workplaces should allow (and even encourage) staff to use social networking sites? I'm particularly interested in the case you would make to someone in the healthcare field but examples that are applicable to other areas, especially those that may ban social networking site for privacy or productivity reasons, are welcome as well.

Help me put my best e-foot forward

Jezztek — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:20:36 -0800

Facebook brutally compresses my images, anything I can do to minimize it? Howdy all,

I'm finally getting around to making a Facebook page for my t-shirt designs, but I have bumped into a problem:

I'm trying to upload images of my designs, which tent to feature large flat areas of solid color. Facebook's compression algorithm mangles some of these solid colored areas them pretty brutally. Example, check out the red in this image:

upload_compare.png

Are there any tricks out there to minimize this problem? Formats, modes, resolutions to save in that might help things? Adding subtle noise, or other tricks to force the algorithm to work a little harder? Alternative means of uploading that don't get the usual treatment? any tricks would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks much!

Getting results, and paying out the ass for it!

chrisfromthelc — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:26:35 -0800

I need to conduct a survey, but I need the traffic to send to it. Are there any services out there (reasonably priced; they need not be free) that will host polls and provide traffic to those polls? I remember seeing ads on Facebook with polls, but can find nowhere to set one up. I'd like to also be able to limit the exposure by demographic (my "product" is pretty age-specific).

Any idea, hivemind?

Living abroad and can't access Gmail or Facebook - help!

nicoleincanada — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:01:16 -0800

I can search Google, read the news and view most websites, but specific sites like Facebook and Gmail won't load on my Mac Powerbook - I just get page load errors. Any idea what the problem is? I'm a Canadian living in France temporarily, and I've taken my laptop from home with me. While here I'm using a shared internet connection at a school, and although I can do web-searching and such, Gmail and Facebook won't load, in Firefox or Safari (or even the crappy discontinued version of Internet Exporer I just downloaded in the hope that it might work). I suspect the problem is with my computer, since other people using the same network connection are able to access these sites with no problems.

The page load error message suggests I might have a firewall in place, but I've checked the settings and nothing seems to be enabled. That said, I'm not terribly well-versed in this stuff. As well, the local tech support guy gave my computer a thorough once-over and can't figure out the problem.

Any ideas? For what it's worth, I've used both Gmail and Facebook in Canada and elsewhere on this computer with no problems.

FacebookFilter

nax — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:57:51 -0800

Facebook has been telling me "Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience" for 5 days. I'm getting no response from them. Other people also cannot get on my page, and switching IP address or using a different network doesn't help. Anyone know why this happens? How do I get it back? Should I attempt to just delete my account (and how do I do that without being able to get on)? If I delete my account, will they let me start over with a new account?

Please no "FB is bullshit/for lamers anyway" answers. I'm concerned about hacking, plus I find FB useful.

Are there privacy-respecting Facebook quiz apps?

ausernamenooneelsehas — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:43:08 -0800

Are there application platforms for building quizzes on Facebook that are not EVIL? I want to build a quiz as part of a marketing campaign, but I know that many of the applications are pretty nasty in their data mining. Any advice?

How does Facebook generate the list of friend icons on the left side of my profile screen?

jason's_planet — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:42:21 -0800

How does Facebook generate the list of friend icons on the left side of my profile screen? How does it decide which ones to display? Does it pick people who've visited my profile lately? Or people whose profiles I've visited? Does it try to mix up people from a variety of groups -- these ones from high school, these from that online group, a certain amount of men, a certain amount of women? I have a hard time believing that the process is entirely random because I've noticed some friend icons appear only at certain points during the week and never appearing during other times of the week.

So what's the deal?

A Better 'Share This' Widget?

toomuchkatherine — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:55:06 -0800

I run a website. Our old 'Share This' widget that goes after posts is woefully out of date. Can anyone suggest a better one? The site I run is on Wordpress. We have a "Bookmark and Share This" thing after posts that just looks awful, and doesn't even have Twitter on it as an option. I'm looking for something free and visually pleasing that allows users to send a post to Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Facebook. More options are fine too. I appreciate your suggestions.

I Am Not My Non-profit

Xurando — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:12:55 -0800

Help me keep my non-profit Facebook page separate from my personal account Help. I am trying to do massive edits and do settings changes on my non profit Facebook page. When I export photos to Facebook for the NP, they show up in my personal page. When I make a settings change it automatically defaults back to my personal page. How can I create some degree of separation between my personal and non profit pages?

How to sync Twitter and Facebook Fan Page

Fluffy654 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:16:10 -0800

How do I sync a twitter account with a Facebook Fan Page? Please note that I am not asking about Facebook Personal Profiles but the Facebook Pages that organizations have. I want to be able to update twitter by updating the Facebook Page Wall. I also want to be able to update the Facebook Page Wall by updating Twitter. I have tried both the Twitter and Selective Twitter Applications for Facebook but neither of them work.

What to do with a threat

ahrara_ — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:57:51 -0800

What legal/law enforcement options do I have to protect myself against someone who is threatening me with bodily harm? I was engaged in a discussion over facebook that got very heated (I'm aware how this sounds). I'll readily admit that I did more to provoke this person than he did to provoke me. One thing led to another until he threatened to "beat [my] ass at one point in time." He then went into considerable detail about why this should happen and what I'd done to deserve it.

This acquaintance has mutual friends. He can find out where I have classes. Moreover, he knows where I live and where I meet for some of the extracurricular activities I do. He's also been arrested for assault before. As a result, I am seriously concerned he may carry out his threats.

1. If this were to actually happen, what can I do to defuse the situation and protect myself?

2. What kind of preemptive action can I take to deter him from confronting me? I have already informed him that I will file charges if he were to hurt me, but given my lack of legal expertise, that sounds like an empty threat. For the lawyers and law majors here, can you tell me what that process looks like so my threat has more credibility? What about law enforcement resources?

Unrequested facebook friends

neelhtak — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:47:34 -0800

Why is it that on Facebook, people can become your friend without your having rec'd a friend request? Is there anything one can do to prevent? Might it be because they're in my email address book? I save many addresses, but am not nec. their friend.

Studying the rise of social websites?

toastchee — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:49:43 -0800

I am keenly interested in the social aspects and pervasive expansion of sites like Facebook. Is this a field of study? Are there good books available to understand this phenomena?

am i infected?

KateHasQuestions — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:24:32 -0800

Is the FanCheck application on facebook a virus? My friend posted this on my page:
"Apparently the FAN CHECK Application is a VIRUS that takes 48 hours to kick in. Even if you are tagged in a photo the virus still attacks you. Please inform all you friends and remove/delete the application ASAP. Copy and paste this as your status so word gets around"

The friend is not sure if it's true or not, just wanted to pass it along to me.

The fan check app tells you how many people comment/like/write on your wall and pictures. I did it, and noticed that it definitely wasn't totally right. One of the people in the top fans list I wasn't even friends with anymore on facebook, but didn't really think twice of it. I just went to the app page because I wanted to remove it just in case, and it just said "The application "Fan Check" is temporarily unavailable due to an issue with its third-party developer. We are investigating the situation and apologize for any inconvenience."

Anyone know if it's a virus, and if yes, what will happen?

As a side question - I've never heard of virus apps on fb before, how would I tell the difference in the future? How good would facebook be with getting rid of them, anyone know?

Sorry if this question makes you think "some people are idiots and shouldn't be using the internet." Technology isn't my strongest forte.