Facebook Timeline and easy OSX screenshots

I can really kill two birds with this post! I just wanted to share a couple neat tricks I came across during Fall Break. The second will be used to highlight the first, and that is Facebook Timeline:

I've heard Facebook Timeline referred to "the journal I didn't realize I was keeping," which I tend to agree with. Facebook Timeline will be going live on October 16, 2011, but it is already up and running for Facebook developers. If you want to enable it now, basically you have to be a developer.

To be a developer, all you have to do is create a Facebook application - even if it doesn't work or do anything at all. Instructions to become a developer (of nothing) can be found via Mashable. It took me about 2 minutes to enable, and now I can make sure I have my timeline sufficiently edited before the big release date.

 

I noticed that a bunch of unflattering photos of myself came rearing their ugly head in the timeline, which appears to give more 'news feed' preference to albums rather than just status updates. Although I had a lot of the unpleasant photos untagged, I still appeared in previews of the entire album that popped up regardless of whether or not I was tagged in them.

Although these photos were never removed from Facebook, I always felt safer by not being tagged. Now that the albums themselves are given more prominence, it's worth taking a walk down memory lane to make sure your public image is intact.



Hiding items from your timeline is easy using the 'Edit or Remove' drop down menu, or you can choose to highlight items by clicking the star, which makes the post wider to cover both columns.

Isn't this fun? I'm using neat trick #2 to talk about neat trick #1. That is to say, I'm utilizing several OSX screenshot capabilities to take quick captures of my Facebook page.

I always wondered how people would take images of their comments on Tumblr and then publicly comment on those comments - it seemed like a lot of work. Now I realize they must have been saving a screen shot of an arbitrary area as a file by holding Command+Shift+4 on their Mac. Check out more options on this Hack College post.

Intel's "Museum of Me" is a fun way to render your recent Facebook activity

I found this on open thinking, and thought I would give it a try. It's called the Museum of Me, and all you have to do is link the application to your Facebook info so it can pull recent and relevant data to put into your museum (and what a trendy looking museum it is!)



Not all of the images were museum-quality, but I guess that's my own fault, right? It seems to pull from more recent data, because everything I saw in my museum was from this year, and I have a lot more content online than what was shown. They even gave me little virtual tourists!



So give it a try, it's an enjoyable 3 minute tour set to music and it doesn't spam you with FarmVille requests!

Class of 2015 Facebook page turned promotional land-grab

Bowling Green State University made a Facebook page for the incoming Class of 2015 that has received a rush of attention. This page has turned into an invaluable forum for conversing with students who are navigating Orientation, networking with each other, or just sharing their excitement.

Looking back, the Class of 2013 page has only 474 Likes, and the subsequent Class of 2014 page saw a jump to 2,806 Likes, but the Class of 2015 page already has 2,942 Likes.

Aside from fostering interactions between future students, the Facebook page has turned into a customer service live chat. Students have been asking how to change majors, or where to buy the summer reading book.

But what's really interesting is watching the various student organizations, club sports, and fraternities and sororities post promotional messages onto the page's wall. It's like a Facebook land-grab for new students who have yet to arrive. I have to admit that I've tried my hand at tapping into this huge population of optimistic students with some mentions of the Student Wellness Network, and advertising a class that only has two students enrolled.





At this point, the population of first-year students hasn't been abused with spam too heavily, and don't seem to mind the occasional solicitation. So I say we all take advantage of this captive audience while we can! If you don't know how to post as your page to another page, read below.

To use Facebook as one of your existing pages, first go to the page that you want to post to and add the page to your page's favorites.



Next, click on the link in the right-hand navigation on your own page. As an example, here is the link to "Use Facebook as BGSU's Student Wellness Network" that I see when I visit my own student group Facebook page.



As long as your page "Likes" the page you're trying to post to, and you are using Facebook as your page, you can post on their wall in the same way you share with friends.

What I Learned: Why wait for new students to get to campus before spamming them?