Facebook is a complex web application with many settings. Some of these settings can be hard to find, mainly because the path to get to them changes every time Facebook changes their layout. Deleting an app or game used to be more difficult, but now can be accessed fairly easy from the side bar on the home page. However, not all apps are displayed in this side bar. To find a complete list of all of your apps, and be able to delete them or change their settings, follow these steps.

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Facebook's Timeline is a major overhaul to the Facebook profile. For me, the Cover Picture is the most welcome new "feature", since it allows you to make your profile "yours", almost as much as you used to be able to do on MySpace (custom overlays notwithstanding).

Beyond this, the Timeline allows you to go back in time and see your previous activity without clicking "Older Posts" countless times. You can fill in old data if you want, even from dates before joining Facebook --or should I say, especially from dates before joining Facebook. After all, Facebook wants your entire life, not just since you joined. It's already data-mined the crap out of the last few years, and now it wants more.

On that note, is Facebook getting too ahead of itself by listing "Born" as the start of the timeline? Do they really want you to go back and add pictures of that painting you made in 5th grade?

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Just today I signed into Facebook to find a new notification informing me that an Arabic-named person had accepted my friend request:



The only problem is, I never sent a friend request to this person. I rarely send friend requests out at all, and only to people that I talk to in person. I checked my friends list to make sure it wasn't an error and sure enough, my new "friend" was in there.

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Facebook just made a minor change to their comment system. You now "Press enter to post your comment" instead of clicking a post button. This means that you can't press enter to make a line break!

Have no fear, you can use shift-enter to create a line break. I'm sure there will be plenty of people prematurely posting comments because of this. ;]




Update: The "Press enter to post your comment" text goes away once you've posted a few comments (or it could be time based).

"Why is my Facebook information being displayed on other web sites?" That's the question I asked myself after visiting Rotten Tomatoes recently. It turns out there's a new Facebook feature I didn't know about that is sharing my information. The best part, it's been out for several months and I didn't know about it. Yippee!

It's called Facebook Instant personalization, and it's a feature that allows certain web sites to access your public Facebook information. These websites, which currently include Rotten Tomatoes, Docs, Pandora, and Yelp, can access any public information from your Facebook profile when you visit their web site, so long as you're logged into Facebook. By default this feature is turned on, so if you're like me (and you aren't constantly monitoring Facebook's developer blog) you probably didn't know about this feature until you visited one of the partner sites and saw your name and profile picture displayed.

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It's rant time again. I was on Facebook looking at events, and in the upper-right corner of the page there was a picture of me at some party, with a message asking "Whose face is this?". Apparently this "Tag a Friend" box pops up occasionally now, on random pages while you're using Facebook, and displays pictures from your friends' pages that aren't tagged.

So in Facebook's never-ending quest to connect anything and everything, their face-recognition software is now finding random non-tagged images and displaying them randomly to people and asking them to tag them. Is there something wrong with a non-tagged photo? Apparently to Facebook there is.

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One of the advantages to making web games for Facebook is that you can utilize the Facebook user_id to uniquely identify users of your game without them having to log in. This makes it easy for them to access your game and continue where they left off. For PHP/JavaScript browser games, this is secure and works well as is; however, for Flash games it presents a problem.

The problem stems from having to pass the user_id into the embedded Flash game via the query string or through the flashvars, in order for the Flash game to know whose account to access in the database. Since this information is readily available in the page's source code, it can allow someone to easily access someone else's game account if they have obtained their Facebook user_id. There are several solutions to this problem, and I will outline them from OK to Best below:

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Micro-Transactions
In an effort to monetize Facebook games beyond advertisements, most all big games offer some way to pay real money to gain in-game currency or items. The annoying part is that many games, including FarmVille (the most popular Facebook game with over 80 million active users), make it nearly impossible to get a lot of the game content without resorting to real money.

Share With Your Friends
In some games, completing the most minor challenge or event will prompt you to share it with your friends, which then spams your friends' news feeds (unless they have blocked that game, which most probably have). This is downright annoying for both the game player and his or her friends. You purchased a dagger in Sword Battle!? Oh wow that's awesome!

Daily Prizes
In an effort to get users to play their games more often, developers add in daily prizes that pop up when you log in and haven't been logged in for a given period of time. Games should sell themselves and not require constant "You've won the daily raffle!" messages to keep users playing.


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