[UPDATE: aha - something else to note, you can no longer see your friends' birthdays easily. What to do: just click the "See More" under the list of current events. Or, you may wish to add this *direct* link to your Facebook friends' birthdays to your bookmarks toolbar on your browser: http://facebook.com/home.php?sk=bd]

Have you noticed your NEW Facebook home page right hand column lately?

Facebook have now placed your Event Invitations and current Events at the VERY top right of the Home page.

Plus, with their new quick'n'easy way to create Events, you can set up an event on the fly right from the box at the top.

Your Requests are now way below, under Suggestions and the Sponsored Ad.

(See my marked up screenshot below).

These changes may seem somewhat minor, however, we can see Facebook are really pushing us to think of using the Events feature even for a quick local rendezvous, online meeting... anything we might like to invite our Facebook friends to.

It's important to note when creating events from this simplified tool, you're of course creating the Event with your personal profile as the host.

If you prefer to create an Event with your fan page as the host, you should go to your fan page first, then click the Event icon on your publisher. Another important point to note: when you create Events with your fan page as the host, you cannot email all invitees. Rather, you send Updates to your invitees (so long as they're fans!), just as you do with your fan page.

What are your thoughts on these changes to the way Facebook Events are featured... and created?

I have the Posterous app installed to my fan page and the settings are configured to publish to the stream... but I'm not sure that they are... just running a wee test.

:)

Mari

screenshot from @GregJarboe's SMSS10 slidedeck today. w00t!

Staring on March 1, 2010, Facebook apps will no longer be able to send users notifications.

You've likely been receiving a few last minute notifications from many apps letting you know they cannot reach you any longer via notifications - such as the screen shot from the Chinese Horoscope app below (oops, forgot I even installed it. Lol!)

Facebook apps CAN contact you via email - IF you choose to opt-in. Each app will need to ask your permission independently. See screenshot of Networked Blogs app (one of my TOP picks!!) below.

This change is really rather significant for app developers and not so much for users.

See this post on the Facebook Developers wiki - excerpted here (remember, this is for Developers):

You can use email to communicate directly with your users. Send email to your users to inform them of interesting and important information, like receipts for purchases they make, messages to help reactivate them if they haven't visited your application or integration in a while, or newsletters promoting new features or contests.

When the user grants your application or site the email extended permission, you receive either the user's primary Facebook email address (the address where Facebook communicates with the user) or a proxied email address. The user chooses which one to share when the user sees the extended permission dialog.

See also Mashable's post here Facebook to Say Goodbye to App Notifications on March 1st.

So, will you be giving your email address to all apps? Just ones you use a lot? Let me know in the comments below:

Over the Holidays, the Blingee Book Facebook app seemed to take over everyone's Facebook walls.

Our friends (mostly!) have good intentions and want to let us know they're thinking of us. However, I honestly MUCH prefer a nice personal, friendly greeting on my wall over an app. App postings are just so... well, impersonal!!!

In this video tutorial, I show how to block apps from being posted on your Facebook wall.

However, just recently, good news! Facebook have added a new link to app postings and now you have the option of blocking the app right from your wall per these screenshots:

I've also begun removing such friends that post these frivolous type of apps where I really do not know personally know the person. I feel that if the only interaction we have is via apps, it's just so distant. It's not the type of relationships I'm striving for on my personal Facebook account.

What are your thoughts? I know a lot of people must be getting driven to distraction with the constant clutter too!! How do you deal with app postings when it's from people you know? Are you okay removing friends or would you rather just block the app and not let the friend know? Write your comments below:

I cannot imagine life without my iPhone. Ever. ;)

Then, last year I made the leap from PC to Mac - treated myself to a MacBook and a monster iMac. (I still use my PCs too as I'm "ambidextrous!")

My big challenge now is how to manage the songs I buy on iTunes on my various computers and on my iPhone.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I understand Apple only allows us to have (is it 3?) limited computers with iTunes.

So now, I'm stuck and would love some help:

1. I bought a bunch of songs directly on my iPhone - how do I get them onto my iMac (iTunes) now? Is there a master list somewhere in the great Apple sky of all the songs we buy on iTunes? My "Purchased" list on my iMac doesn't include the songs I bought on my iPhone... which is why I'm trying to add them. lol! I've been doing the sync process, but the songs on my iPhone don't seem to want to move onto my iMac.
2. I want to make a publically shareable playlist in iTunes of the songs I bought on my iPhone... but I don't think I can do this without getting the sync to work, right?
3. And, how do I make my own playlists on my iPod (iPhone) with songs I bought on the iPhone?

If you're a Mac/Apple/iTunes/iPhone wizard - please do shed some light!!!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Thanks heaps!

I've long since had my privacy settings on Facebook set that whenever I choose to add/confirm a friend, it does NOT go on my wall or out in the News Feed of all my friends. I have my reasons for this.

However, with the recent change in Privacy settings, I can no longer configure this setting.

Plus, there's a sudden surge in wall/News Feed activity in regards to every comment, like, wall post, friend addition, etc.

Is Facebook's Privacy Really "Granular?"

Frankly, I'm a tad frustrated at the new uber granular settings. I just can't seem to get the settings the way I want them... and I know a ton of peeps feel the same way.

In fact, I saw a bug today on my "Posts by Me" Privacy setting: I used to have it set to "Everyone" except a Friend List I'd made called "Limited Profile" mostly containg a handful of close family members I didn't want to bombard with all my business-related updates. But the "Everyone" option is no longer there when I click Custom:

Facebook say we can now control who sees every single thing we publish; fair enough. BUT - that is not true of adding new friends, commenting and liking for instance. There is NO way to turn these on/off in the new Settings. :(

Sharing With Everyone

Facebook's Privacy changes were made in an effort to make the site more open and public.

Check out this very informative interview of Barry Schnitt, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook on ReadWriteWeb.com:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebook_changed_privacy_policies.php

This nugget from Barry on the RWW post is most revealing:

"By making the world more open and connected, we're expanding understanding between people and making the world a more emphathetic place," Schnitt said. "And we know that when users find their friends, are found by their friends and learn more about the world around them - they find more value on the site. From a business perspective, if users are finding more value from the site they will come back more and engage in more activity. And you can imagine the business consequences of that."

I'm off to shoot a video tutorial on this subject!

Meantime, let me know what do you think? How are you finding the new Facebook Privacy settings? And is the excess activity a benefit or drawback to how you use Facebook yourself and how you interact with friends/potential friends?

As ironic as it is - given my passion and expertise for Facebook for the past 2.5 years - I tend to let my Requests build up to the point of overwhelm... as you can see from this screenshot with 2,983 pending friend requests and 878 other requests, of which 610 are fan page suggestions:

5,000 Friend Max

Facebook have long since had a limit of 5,000 on the number of friends you can add. I'd heard rumors for some time that the 5k limit would be lifted... alas, it doesn't seem so.

500 Fan Page Max

Also, you may not have known this, but you can only join 500 fan pages. I hadn't realized this fact last year until I had somehow managed to join 650 fan pages and then got an error message one day when trying to join more!! Oops.

Friend/Fan Limit Bug??

It seems I must've tripped some kind of lockdown bug. Because, even though I "unfanned" a couple hundred fan pages (mostly all major brands so that I could fan my students, clients and friends) and am now below the limit of 500 (I'm a fan of 430 Facebook fan pages currently), I cannot join fan pages directly from the web. I get this error message:

Suggest To Friends

I can, however, join fan pages so long as the page is suggested to me (and I can find it in my suggestions!)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Personally, I'm not a fan (!) of the "Suggest To Friends" feature - it feels sort of "intrusive," like you have to go about asking people to be a fan. I much prefer all kinds of other ways, such as using the Share button, @ tagging, status updates, Twitter, ezine, email signature file, fan badge, etc.  (Access these ideas more in-depth on my blog at whyfacebook.com and also at SocialMediaExaminer.com - I have posts going up on both blogs in January 2010 with a wide range of fan engagement and fan growth ideas for you).

iPhone App Workaround

Meantime, I have discovered an interesting workaround - I can search for fan pages and potential friends on my Facebook iPhone app. So long as the person/fan page comes up (not all seem to be findable on the mobile web), I'm able to add/fan them... I'm sure still within the limitations. I haven't tried going over the max... yet! :)

Spam Trigger for Excessive Emails

Wouldn't it be great if we could set up an autoresponder system when someone sends a friend request to let them know you'd like them to join your fan page? That's on my wish list. ;)

See, if you're not careful and you have a lot of incoming friend requests over and above the max, and you email your pending friend requests peeps to ask them to join your fan page... you can have your profile deactivated for suspected spam. This has happened to peeps I know.

So, I choose to not send any message and, sadly, just ignore the friend request (or add them if they really are someone I know/want to know)... and hope those folks will connect with me in other ways, e.g. via Twitter, my fan page, blogs and email list.

Facebook Request "Housekeeping"

And now, as part of my New Year cleansweep, I plan to go through all my friends and remove any who we never interact and do not really know at all, and then review my pending requests and process. As I do, I'll be looking for creative workarounds for the a) friend/fan page limitations, b) spam triggers, c) fan page suggestions/invitations.

Now it's your turn - how are you managing and processing your Facebook requests?

I'm a relatively new Mac user, having bought a 27" iMac about six months ago. But I still use my various PC's too, so consider myself "ambidextrous!"

Recently, my iMac started running real slow; my Adobe Air based apps, Firefox, MS Word, iPhoto - the works.

So, I turned to my trusty Twitter community and put out this tweet:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I immediately received a slew of great suggestions from my Twitter peeps - many excerpted below - that seemed to fall into one of seven possible steps:

1.    Clear desktop icons
2.    Empty cache
3.    Check for spyware
4.    Run a backup in case of hard drive failure
5.    Optimize drives with Drive Genius or Disk Warrior
6.    Optional: defrag with iDefrag or Onyx
7.    Reboot

My desktop was littered with unused icons & files; so I scooped 'em up into folders. Then I shut down the huge number of programs, windows, tabs and files I had open and then rebooted. Though my whole machine is working much zippier now, Twhirl keeps twhirling... lol!! (Twhirl is a desktop Twitter app made by Seesmic and is based on Adobe Air just like Tweetdeck; I've been a diehard Twhirl user for eons now... along with my fave Hootsuite!).

So, if you have suggestions for why Twhirl keeps running slow, do let me know! :)

Also, I've no idea how to empty cache - it appears this is done automatically with Macs?! I found some sources online that say emptying cache can even make the computer run slower.

Meantime, by way of acknowledgement and mucho appreciation, here are tweets from my peeps - and see the whole Twitter thread here.

Have you tried emptying all caches?  That should help.  Good luck.
~ @MasterYourMoney

My iMac did that leading up to a HD failure. How's your backups?
~ @BillDowns

Interestingly enough, the number of icons on the desktop affects performance. If you have a lot if that could be the cause. Shove all those icons into a folder, restart, and see what happens.
~ @dbarnhart

Check for spyware. I use adaware from lavasoft.com - personal version is free. | Quick google on this says OS X systems defrag automatically, usually at night, so powering off every night stops that. Article on the subject from CNET.
~ @debgallardo

Look at Drive Genius ($99) or Disk Warrior ($99.95) for your iMac. They both optimize drives .
~ @JerryNielsen

Have you run OnyX (free)? It works pretty good. iDefrag is also ok, you can download a trial to see if you need to defrag.
~ @mokemorgan

So, there you have it. If you're a Mac peep and know a thing or two about optimizing performance, please do add your $0.02 - I'd love to know and pass along!

Cheers,

Mari