From the monthly archives:

October 2009

In this tutorial we will see how to use our facebook profile wall. I have divided this section into two parts. In this part we will see what our profile wall looks like and what are the different things present on our profile  page.

I have made a very dirty labeling of the various parts, sections and options present on the profile wall. Have a look at the picture given below and we’ll see what they are according to their labels. Hope i won’t remind you of school :)

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1. This is your profile picture. If you have not added any profile picture you will see only a passport-type Silhouette of a person.

2.  This is your profile wall and profile info tab. Currently profile wall is selected. To check your complete infomation just click on the ‘info’ tab, it will look something like the image below. You can also view the complete information of your friends  in the same way.

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You can also add more tabs here like photo tab, video tab, events tab, notes tab etc by clicking on the “+” and selecting choosing form the different option provided. More options will be available when you start using different facebook applications.

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3. This is your publisher window. You can use it to post message, more appropriately ‘Status Messages’ on your profile wall.

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4. This part is your main profile wall. It shows all the recent activities that you and your friends have been doing in facebook. You can delete the unwanted notifications. When you point your mouse on any notification, a ‘Remove’ button will appear. You can remove any unwanted notifications through that button. More on how to use your profile wall will be explained in the second part of the tutorial.

5. This part gives a quick peek at your profile information. You can select what information you want to show here. Click on the little edit symbol given on the right and check the things you want to show.

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6. This part will show your friends. It will look a little different with miniature profile picture of your friends when you start adding friends.

7. This part is also a publisher. It allows you post or attach photos, add videos, events and links to web pages along with your messages on your profile wall.

8. This option is used to select what activities or notifications  should be shown on your profile wall. You can show notifications of only your activities, your friends’ activities etc.. But it is better to leave this one at its default setting.

9. This part is actually for the whole bar. Left hand side icons are used to access facebook applications,  your photo page, video page, groups page, notes page, and links page. Facebook chat and notifications are available on the right side of the bar.

Hope you are very much familiar with your profile wall now. In the second part of this tutorial we will see how to use features in the profile wall. See you in the next part of the tutorial.

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This is the page that welcomes new comers to Facebook.

3a 300x216 How To Add Information To Your Facebook Profile
If you are not a facebook newbie, then edit your profile by clicking on the ‘edit profile’ located just below your profile photo.

For the newbies, let us leave the part to search for people at this moment. Let’s put some information about ourselves first. There won’t be many people who would accept someone who don’t have any information about themselves except a name that sound familiar.

So let’s jump to the next link that says “View and edit your profile”, indicated with an arrow in the image above. Clicking on this link brings you to a page like the one given below.

3b 300x216 How To Add Information To Your Facebook Profile
This is the page that you are going to personalize with information about yourself. There are four kinds of information that you need to add which are of course not mandatory.

A little word of caution; you can add as much or as little information about yourself. But information like your phone numbers or personal emails or any other information that can be used against you or information that can be abused by others should not be entered here. The information that you enter in your profile will be seen by anyone who checks out your profile. Who sees your information or what they see etc will be covered in tutorials regarding security settings. So for now, let us just add some basic information about yourself, so that your friends and relatives will recognize you.

There are four types of information we will be entering here:
Basic Information
Personal Information
Contact Information
Education and Work

Let’s have a look at the Basic Information first.
1. Sex:  Choose Male or Female.
Below this says, “Show my sex in my profile” with a small check box. If check, your sex will be visible to others who view your profile. If unchecked, your profile won’t show whether your are male or female.

2. Birthday: Enter your date of birth here.
In the combo box you can choose not to my your birthday public, or choose to show only the day and month.

3. Hometown: Enter the name of your hometown.
This information  can be a great way for meeting people from the same place. I have personally seen some people who enters things like “Heaven”, “Somewhere on this earth”, or “Virtual world”. If you are really serious about socializing and meeting people, you better enter your real hometown and expect a message like “Hey!! you too from that place??”

4. Home Neighborhood: Your neighborhood.

5. Family Members: Add your family members here if you want to. First select a relation type, say father or mother, from the drop down menu and enter their name in the textbox provided. If you want to add another member, just click on the ‘Add another family member’ link. Then a new drop down menu and textbox will appear where you can enter another family member. Continue the process to add more family members.

6. Relationship Status: Choose a relationship status from the drop down menu, that best matches your current relationship status.

7. Political Views: You can enter your political view here, e.g. Democratic, Republican etc..One interesting entry i have seen in “What is politics?” :)

8. Religious View: You can enter your religious view here.

Now, we are done with the Basic information. Check all your entries once again and if you are satisfied click on the save changes button.

Let’s move on to the next part, i.e. Personal information. Click on the ‘Personal Information’ link. You will see a page like the picture given below, with some keywords and textboxes next to them. Fill them one by one, so that people who checks out your profile will know more about more and find some common interests.

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Once you are done adding information, save the changes you have made.

Move on to the third part, Contact Information but clicking on the ‘Contact Information’ link. In the page that loads, add your informations, which again is not mandatory.

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1. IM Screen Name(s): Here you can enter the screen names that you use in some of the most popular IM’s. Enter your screen name and choose the IM’s name by selecting it from the drop down menu. To Add more screen names click on add another screen name and continue the process.

2. Moblie Phone: Enter your mobile phone number here starting with a +(country code)(mobile number).

3. Land Phone: Enter you Land-line phone using the format given above.

4. Address: Enter your Address, City/Town, Neighborhood and Zip code.

5. Website: Enter site/blog url that you own. You can also enter urls or site that you like, but this can be done in a better way which will be shown in ‘How to Manage Your Facebook Wall’

Now just above the ‘save changes’ button, you will find a link called “Create a Facebook Badege for your Website”. Facebook badge will look something like this:

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Which is a facebook widget, and can be added to your blog or website. More about this will be explained in tutorials on using facebook widgets. So for now we need to save all the hard work that we have done. Save the changes you have made and go to the last part “Education and Work”.

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Now, this information is really important to have if you want to meet up with your old mates. A rather nice way to stumble upon your high school, college mates.

1. College/University: Enter your college/university. Don’t forget to mention the place too, as there will be lots of same college name in different places.Select yor class year and indicate whether you attended college or graduate school.

The next part ‘Concentration’ can be little confusing for some people. It refers to what ‘Major subject’ you took in the college/university that you entered above.

If you happened to hopped around many colleges/universities, then you might want to add more. Just click on add another school and enter your information.

2. High School: Same as above. Enter you High School information in this section.

3. In this section you should add information about your current job.
Employer:
Position:
Description:
City/Town:
Time Period: Check it and select the month and year.

If you want to add another or more job profiles, you can do so by clicking on the given  ‘Add Another Job’ link.

That’s it. We have gone through the gruelling process on adding all necessary information about ourselves. Save the hard work done.

Now scroll up the page and click on ‘Done Editing’. All information about you can be view here.

Lastly, you can edit your profile information anytime you want. Go to your profile page by clicking on ‘Profile’ tab located on the top-left, click on the ‘Edit Profile’ link located just below your profile photo and add, delete, update as you like. Our job of how to enter information in your facebook profile is done, i’ll see you in the next ‘How To’.

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Now that your Facebook account is created, type Facebook.com into your web browser and Facebook home page will load. In the area circled with yellow ellipse in the screenshot below you will see two textbox. Here is what to do:

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1. In the first textbox, enter your email that you have used to sign up for your Facebook account.
2. In the second textbox, enter the password that you entered while signing up for your Facebook account.
3. Click on the Login button next to the second textbox and viola! “Welcome to the word’s busiest social networking site”

Sometimes you get an error message like the screenshot given below. In that case please read a little further down this article.

2b 300x225 How To Log In To Your Facebook Account

One of the most common mistakes is typing in a wrong password. Second common mistake is providing only half of your mail address as we are quite habituated in typing only the user name when we log into our mail. For example, this is your mail id myemail@hotmail.com. We usually enter only the ‘myemail’ part when we log into our mail accounts. In Facebook we need to provide the whole address i.e. myemail@hotmail.com. Also remember to check whether the caps lock on your keyboard is on or not.

If you are not one of the people above, then you must have either forgotten which email or password you used to sign up for your Facebook account. But, don’t worry we will learnt how to get it back.
1. Click on the ‘Forgot your password?’ link just below the login button. A new page will load like the image given below.

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2. Next enter the letters and/or numbers provided in the textbox below the image.
3. Enter your full email address that you used while signing up for your Facebook account.
4. Next, click on reset password. A new page like the image given below will load.

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5. Now, open a new browser window and go to your the mail account that you provided while making your Facebook account and check for any mail from Facebook.
6. Copy the code provided in your ‘Facebook Password Reset Confirmation’ mail and paste it in the textbox and click on submit button. Alternatively, you can also click on the link given below the confirmation code in your mail.

7. In the next page enter your desired, new password in the first textbox. Confirm it by entering the same password again and click on change password button. The page will look like the image below.

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8. You will reach a “Welcome to Facebook, yourname” page, which means you have successfully changed your password and logged in to your Facebook account. Congrats!

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Another day, another facebook login problem.  This time, we hear from Twitter fans lashing out because they can’t log into their facebook accounts.

Here are some quotes of the day:

  • I am getting really mad at Facebook. I can’t login to my account too many times during the day, it’s more of a pain than anything.
  • anyone here experience login & slow loading page problem on facebook??
  • Im having Facebook site maintenance login problem, help Facebook
  • is facebook having problem at the moment ? It’s difficult to login sumtime & slow at loading page

Golly.. Are we seeing a trend here?

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If you’re an avid gamer on Facebook or visit various application pages, you could be at risk for being hacked. Chief Research Officer, Roger Thompson, has come across a half-dozen Facebook games and application pages that have been affected. Although hacked profiles are not uncommon, this is the first that Thompson has seen application being hacked.

According to Thompson’s findings, these hackers have somehow put “iframes” (small hidden computer code) into each of the pages that users go to in order to use the apps and games. If you’re running outdated Adobe software, you’re vulnerable. If you are running an outdated version of Adobe Reader and its patches are not updated, you could be hacked. Adobe released a new Acrobat version this week which repairs approximately 29 vulnerabilities. In July, Thompson wrote a column, “PC Infections Often Spread To Websites”, and in there he explains how malware can place malicious iframes into the available web page files on the victims PC in order to further spread the virus.

Facebook spokesman Simon Axton released a statement to Security Fix saying “This was a low volume attack affecting a small number of applications with relatively few users. However, we take all reports of malicious activity seriously and quickly placed a moratorium on the applications yesterday afternoon making them unavailable. We also contacted the developers to notify them of the issue so they can fix it. We won’t make the applications available again until the problem has been resolved.”

Make sure you run the latest updates from Adobe to protect yourself. Again, this is an eye opener to the fact that your information is never “safe” out there and third party software can pose a huge risk even though you’re accessing it through a trusted site

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