I made my Facebook account to connect with my friends and family members. I am connected to most of my buddies and homies and near and dear ones through Facebook. Over time, i started playing a lot of Facebook games and my account went wild. Let me tell you how 
Take a popular game, Mafia Wars for example. In Mafia wars, up to 500 of your top mafia friends’ best armor and weapon for both attack and defense will be counted while fighting. Who wants to lose to someone 20-30 levels less than you?? Not me!!! I didn’t like to see the messages like “You were out gunned” or “You were out manned”. So i started adding people to my friends list who were also like me and were searching for people who plays Mafia wars, to grow and become a great Mafia…huh. The problem is, i was playing or trying out far too much applications and games.
Within some months, though i log in to my Facebook account everyday, maybe 5-10 per day, my profile wall will be filled with stories about this and that and what not, which i became sick of. Some friends just loves publishing whatever they do in game or application. On any day, such friend playing Mafia wars will level up at least thrice, ask help for at least 10 jobs and a couple of war, ice some 50+ opponent and whacked at least 10 opponent. So, at least 60-70 stories will be published on my wall too. Just imagine if you have around 200 – 300 of such friends. Profile wall stretches forever, three to four pages of suggestions and another 5-6 pages of requests to tend to everyday, which i finally stopped checking. The result was, i missed out a lot of important requests and notifications.
Though it was very boring and time consuming, i sat down one day to remove and check out everyting and find a solution to stop further mess. After some hours of playing around with the different features of Facebook.. “Bingo,” all my settings were just default settings. So, i started changing them, but it was so time consuming. I didn’t know two-third of the people in my friends list. So, this was making it hard for me to mess around with the settings. I thought over my problems again and finally found the root of the problem, “Too much friends who were not managed.” I slowly came up with some solutions and they worked like gem for me.
If you are like me and is facing the same problem, i am sure you will find some help here. Here are my 3 top ways of managing my Facebook account.
1. Categorize your friends
This is very, very basic and important work. If you have many friends and haven’t categorize them well, take an hour or two to categorize them. This will save you 100 hours in future and not to mention, 100s of headaches and embarrassments. Categorize you friends into family, business, friends, game friends as necessary and add them to the required list. When you are done with categorizing your friends then meddling with the account settings will be a breeze. All you have to do is customize your settings and put exception to some or particular group. This will ensure that your privacy settings stays intact and does what you want it to do.
2. Hide and Block
Do not hesitate to hide someone or applications if you don’t want any stories about it to be published on your wall. Most friends added for the sake of some application or games won’t mind you hiding them from your profile wall.
Going to your suggestions and requests page, wherever there is an option to block, don’t hesitate to block an application that you are not going to use or don’t want to use. Also, don’t hesitate to block a person if he/she sends out more than 5 different application request everyday. He/she won’t play or use all these applications for long. Blocking will stop similar request in future for that particular application or from that person.
3. Make Use of your Account, Privacy, and Application Settings
What is the use of just categorizing your friends or hiding and blocking applications and people if you don’t have decent settings. Make use of the options available to you. Like i said above, this is going to save you a lot of headache and embarrassment. The more friends you have, the more possibility for both problems. Choose wisely, which group of your friend can see what information about you, which group can do what in your profile, and which applications can publish what on your profile.
Apart from friends stories adding woes to your profile wall, don’t you add more trouble. Go to you Application settings and remove all the application options that will publish stories on your wall, especially those third-party applications. You may keep the options check for Facebook applications like Events, Photos, Videos, Notes, Gifts, and Links.
If you are not sure about the various settings, please check out the tutorials section.
If you follow these three ways, i am sure you are always gonna be happy when you see your Facebook account. These three ways took care of my messy account in matter of days.
