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Ivan Petkov

I decided to write this article after I talked with a very good friend and colleague of mine from the field, who was surprised by the fact that almost every time I respond quickly to his comments left on my wall on Facebook. He jokingly suggested that I am "hanging" on Facebook all day long, despite my peculiar attitude to "hanging" around ... anywhere. I told him that there is a way to do everything and modern technology has provided us with sufficient sources to get informed quickly without wasting valuable time and what is more important, without having to "hang" on Facebook. I thought and I remembered some news for people who were fired because they were constantly on Facebook. I realized that many people actually know only one way to receive information from Facebook and that's it...by opening the site.

This article is for all those who do not want to "hang" on Facebook; for people who have little free time but still want to be in touch with the interesting and perhaps important things that their friends on Facebook share, and for all the curious, of course.

Facebook provides a standard notification way which is not quite effective – by e-mail. Even more - it is annoying! This was the reason to temporarily deactivate my account on Facebook, because I did not have the time to search the settings to “turn it off”, because my mail is filled with 40-50 messages every day. If you have a company mail and have to read and write many e-mails, the last thing you would like to see are more unread messages in your inbox. So, my recommendation is to turn off the Facebook e-mail notification if you have not done so yet.

Facebook also offers a chat service. The disadvantage is that you should be in the social network to access it. This, however, has changed. You can use the Facebook chat through one of the many IM clients. Personally, I would recommend you three of them depending on how advanced user you are.

The first chat client is for the most novice users, but also for people who love applications like "install and forget". This IM client has a long history and is actually a veteran. Until recently, some of the useful services it offered were only used with its paid version. Now, they can also be used with the free version at the cost of advertising, but it is not intrusive and unpleasant. It's about Trillian.

Trillian not only offers connection with the most popular IM networks, but it has better integration with the most popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Each of the social networks has its icon in the Windows system tray and a figure shows you the number of the unread updates from your friends:

To learn more about Trillian, please visit the website of this wonderful IM client: http://www.trillian.im/

The second chat program is not so bright and you will have to browse through its extensions for some specific things, but its advantage is that it has no ads, it is completely free and is of the open source type. Besides, it has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. This is the nice pigeon that carries the messages: Pidgin

A brief guide on how to set the “pigeon” is available on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

The last program is for passionate chat users who like to have the widest possible choice of settings. Miranda is a simple and easy program that provides an opportunity to expand its settings and change its appearance and virtually every aspect of it. For this purpose, however, it needs more browsing and I would recommend it only to advanced users who believe will have no problems with the launching of the Facebook protocol or directly though XMPP. Miranda IM and its various extensions can be downloaded from the official website: http://www.miranda-im.org/

So, now you can chat with your friends without having to log on Facebook! And Trillian enables you to view and comment on the last things that your friends have placed on their walls without logging on Facebook.

I would propose the people who prefer browsers to use extensions for two of the best browsers - Firefox and Chrome. The extensions are small widgets that are installed in the browser and add additional features to it. In the case of Facebook, there are many and various extensions of these browsers, which you can download from their web sites: Firefox and Chrome.

I will give you as an example an extension for Firefox, which can be used not only with Facebook. The extension is called Tab Badge and has a very simple task - to show the new posts on each page or site - it can be used for Twitter, Gmail, Facebook. Here's how it looks:

A small figure in a red circle indicates how many unread messages you have. In this way you are notified about the messages you have without being on the Facebook page and to review them in detail when you have time.

Mobile applications for smart phones like iPhone and phones with Android. The iPhone has a nice feature to display a message on the screen, showing who commented something written by you. Here is the “secret” how I know when and what my colleague said - my phone gives me a beep and I understand what is urgent or interesting, and who has written on Facebook just with a glance, without “hanging” around there. Thus, I can even decide whether it is better to call on the phone or use some other type of communication.

Instead of conclusion, I would share a personal practice that is an expression of my own vision for the use of social networks. I mentioned above how many e-mails I received from Facebook and how that was the reason to temporarily close my account. I had all sorts of friends from different areas, some of them shared what they had for breakfast or what their pet did or things that do not excite me much. The first thing I did after I activated my account was to cancel all e-mail notifications. The second thing was to remove from my contacts all the people who shared information completely useless for me. At that time the control over the groups of friends was very weak and there were no settings currently allowing me to set who can read what I wrote. Although now I can control who can read what I wrote, according to the type of information I publish, I continue to follow the rule not to pile "friends" just for their number who share a lot of information that is not interesting to me.
 
And just finally - if you obsessively play games or just waste time to use Facebook as a form of combination of gossip and BigBrother, then I can wholeheartedly tell you that there is no technology invented to help you yet. Facebook is just a tool and it depends entirely and only on you how it will be used!