1. Adding Location: The new feature lets you add location to any image while viewing it, which was previously not possible after an image was already uploaded. You have to do it from the maps feature. But now you can alter the location of any of your uploaded images at time you choose directly from the image viewing screen.

2. Specify a date to show it on your timeline: Since the new timeline has launched and has constantly being promoted, you can add any image to your timeline from the timeline page of your profile. With the new theater mode you can add any image to your timeline right from the interface you are viewing it. That’s neat.

Apart from these all the older features are still present there which are rotating images, tagging people or choosing them as your profile picture. The new change looks more tidy and the left to right positioning of the elements (comments, location, date, description etc) offers complete viewing without you needing to scroll down through the page.

It’s hard to tell if the new layout is live for everyone but quite a few people have it already activated on their profile as far my connections go. Well my guess is this is still in beta phase and live for a few people only. Here’s a sneak peek before you can try your hands on it.

Update: The new photoviewer is rolled out for all users.

Facebook Rolls Out New Layout for Theater Mode Picture Viewing originally published on Ampercent

If you are using Facebook for the last three years, the situation is even alarmic. There is a high chance that some of your old photos or status updates are marked as “Public” and anyone can access that information, provided they know the profile URL of your Facebook account. On rare occasions, this can lead to severe consequences such as profile impersonification, spam and social embarrassment.

Another problem is that you have to invest a lot of time in checking the privacy settings of old Facebook posts, photos and status updates. Cleaning up your Facebook timeline, which has been living for the last 5 years, is certainly not that easy or straight forward.

Here are some ways to clean up your Facebook profile from junk status updates, links, tagged photos, videos and control who can view your profile information and specific posts on your Facebook profile.

Use Facebook Activity Log to View All Your Facebook Posts In One Page

Thankfully, Facebook has released an activity log feature which allows you to view all your Facebook posts in a single page. The activity log feature in Facebook is enabled by default and it works for newer Facebook profiles ( aka Timelines) as well as the older ones.

To view all your Facebook updates in one page, go to your Facebook profile and click the “Activity log” button on the top right corner.

This will open the Facebook activity log page where you can control the privacy and visibility of old Facebook posts, videos, photos as well as find hidden posts on your Facebook timeline.

The activity log page is record of your entire Facebook activity, which includes the following things

• Your status updates.
• The links you have posted, including YouTube videos or Facebook videos.
• Your photo uploads and photos where you have been tagged.
• Your comments.
• Posts on your timeline.
• Posts from Facebook applications, games and other third party websites which you are using with Facebook connect.

Please note that only you can view your entire Facebook activity log and there is no way anyone else can view all your Facebook activity. Here is how the activity log of your Facebook profile should look like:

Filter Status Updates, Links, Videos And Photos On Your Facebook Profile

Similar to Facebook news feed, the activity log has a “Filter updates” feature, which can be used to find all the status updates, photos uploads, links and videos that have been posted by you. Hit the tiny drop down menu at the top right corner and you can filter the following items on your Facebook timeline:

• Your posts along with their privacy settings.
• The date when you added someone as your Facebook friend.
• Your Facebook updates which have a “Location” tag attached to them, this is handy when you want to find out updates that were sent from a specific location.
• A complete record of all your Facebook comments, this is useful when you want to remove older comments.
• Groups joined, Likes made, Subscriptions and Events where you have been involved or invited to.
• Application specific updates. For example: Filter all the updates of Foursquare and mass delete all of them, in case you do not want to share your location with anyone on Facebook.

Manage The Privacy And Visibility Of Older Facebook Updates

To control the privacy setting of older Facebook posts, hit the dropdown menu on right and select whether the update should be publicly available or whether you want only specific people to see it. Past status messages and posts, that are archived on your Facebook timeline may be embarrassing sometimes and you definitely don’t want your boss or Employer to have a peak within your life.

The general rule of the thumb is to hit the “Feature” button on posts that you want to keep while hide older posts from all friends and contacts on Facebook. Your friends are more interested in the events and happening stories of your life ( e.g birthday, engagement, marriage, education, promotion and so forth).

While it is a trend and common posture to share YouTube videos, FourSquare checkins, Tweets and other random stuff on your Facebook timeline, there is no point in archiving them and keeping them stagnant on your timeline.

The sad part is that there is no way to bulk delete old stuff and clean up everything. Manually deleting old status messages and links is the only way around, but you can also hide them from your timeline, change the visibility to specific friend lists or choose “Only Me”.

Clean Up Your Facebook Timeline Using Facebook Activity Log originally published on Ampercent

Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus have their Android and iPhone apps but there is no easy way to bulk upload photos to multiple social networks – all at once.

Bulk Uploads Photos To Facebook, Google Plus And Twitter Using Your Email Account

Here is how you can upload photos to Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, no matter which platform or device you are using.

You may be using an iPad, an Android phone, a Windows desktop or a primitive phone but as long as these devices are connected to the Internet and you have access to your email inbox – you can bulk upload photos to Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, all at the same time.

Another advantage of using email for photo uploads is when social sites are blocked behind corporate firewalls and you need a third party solution which just works.

1. Go to the Facebook mobile page, sign in with your Facebook account and grab your unique Facebook mobile upload email address. This email address will be in the form of [secret string]@m.facebook.com, as shown below:

It is quite difficult to remember this email address, so you should email yourself a copy by hitting the link “send my upload email to me now”.

2. Now that we are done with the Facebook part, it is time to set up email uploads for your Google Plus account.

Unfortunately, Google Plus does not allow uploading photos via email attachments, but we can use Picasa web albums to our advantage. The good news is that all the photos stored in our Picasa web albums are also accessible and viewable by Google Plus friends, as long as the visibility of a chosen Picasa album is set as “Public”.

Login to your Google Plus account and click this link. Choose the option “Allow photo uploads by email” and enter a secret word, as shown below:

Copy your unique Picasa upload email address and keep it handy.

3. A few months back, Twitter introduced their native photo sharing feature but sadly, Twitter is yet to enable support for photo uploads via email. Third party photo uploading applications are available in plenty, but lets keep things simple and restrict ourselves to using only one app – The email inbox.

Go to Flickr.com, sign in with your Yahoo account and open this link. Flickr also supports open ID logins via Facebook or Google, so creating a brand new Flickr account won’t be much of a hassle.

Once you have connected your Flickr and Twitter accounts, Flickr will give you a unique photo upload email address so that you can upload photos to your Flickr account from email. When you upload photos to your Flickr account, Flickr will automatically tweet a link of your photo in your Twitter profile.

So we are done with setting up secret email addresses for photo uploads to Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter.

Setting Up Your Email Account

I assume you are using Gmail as your primary email inbox, the following procedure should work for Yahoo, Windows Live and Hotmail accounts as well.

1. Go to Google contacts and create a new contact group. Name it “Photo uploads” and add all the three secret upload email addresses as Gmail contacts one by one. Remember to enter a memorable name e.g “Facebook Photos” for the Facebook upload email and so forth.

2. You are through. Now you can upload photos to Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter – all at the same time. It can be your android phone, your iPad or your desktop – email is universal!

On Your desktop: Simply compose a new email message, upload all the photos as email attachments and use the group name in the “To:” field.

On Your Android:  The email group wont work here, so you have to individually type the contact names one by one in the “To:” field. That’s easily fixed, as we have chosen very memorable names while adding the contacts e.g Facebook, Google Plus and Flickr

Some things to take note of before you hit “Send”:

1. The subject line of your email will be tweeted when your photo is uploaded to Twitter via the Flickr to Twitter service.

2. If the subject line matches exactly with the name of any of your Picasa photo albums, the photo will be uploaded to that photo album only. In all other cases, the photo will be uploaded in the default “Drop box” folder. This photo will appear in your Google Plus account, almost immediately.

3. On Facebook, your chosen photo will be uploaded into the “Mobile Uploads” album and will be automatically shared on your wall or timeline.

For the sake of a test, I tested the above procedure from my Android phone and it worked like a charm.

What is your preferred way of uploading photos to Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus? Share your ideas in the comments section.

Related: Bulk upload photos and videos to Facebook from Android

Bulk Upload Photos to Facebook, Twitter And Google Plus – All At The Same Time originally published on Ampercent

Consider this. On every weekend, you are bombarded with dozens of friend requests from people you don’t know in real life. You accept these friend requests but fail to realize that befriending strangers on Facebook can be a big security threat in so many different ways.

There are basically two ways to stop people from sending you friend requests at Facebook.

1. Login to your Facebook account, go to “Privacy settings” and click edit settings under “How you connect” section. The default setting is “Everyone”, change this to “Friends of friends”. Now click “Done”.

It goes without saying that you should choose “friends” under “who can see your posts in the timeline”. You surely don’t want anyone to see all your Facebook status updates or posts. Doing so will defeat the sole purpose of not accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers in the first place.

When you choose the privacy setting that only direct friends of your friends can send you friend requests, you limit the number of people who can send friend invitations to your Facebook profile. When you receive a friend request and see that there are zero mutual friends, you should not accept him/her as a friend, unless you know this person already.

Suggestions for Parents

If you are concerned that your child is spending too much time on Facebook and be-friending strangers, here are a couple of things you may want to do:

1. Talk with your child and make him aware of Internet hazards. Enlighten him about the various consequences he might face when he accepts friend requests from strangers. These people can get very personal information and use it against the safety and security of your kid, so the first thing you should do is make him aware of consequences of social networking.

2. If you find that another Facebook profile is impersonating your child’s profile, head over to the timeline of the fake Facebook profile and click the dropdown menu on the upper right corner. Next, choose “This profile is pretending to be me” and file a spam report.

3. Ask your child to let you use his Facebook profile in his presence. Promise him that you won’t see his messages and neither you would breach his privacy, but you want to scan his entire friend list for his safety only. There is a thin chance that your child might accept your offer , so it never hurts to give this a try.

4. Go to safetyweb, create an account and request a social profile report of your child. Safetyweb is one of the best online reputation and privacy management site, which can be used to find all the public information about a person that is scattered all across the internet. You can use the pro plan at $10 a month and receive automated parental control alerts for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other online accounts of your child.

Getting Too Many Friend Requests on Facebook From Strangers? Here Is How To Stop Them originally published on Ampercent

I am a video addict. I watch all sorts of videos on Facebook, YouTube ad Twitter. The problem with watching videos on your Facebook news feed is that you have to pause the video for a while until the video has finished buffering completely. This can be quite irritating, especially when you are hurrying to see unread updates on your news feed and the video you want to watch isn’t buffering at all.

Most users scroll down to read the updates, reach the end of the news feed, click the “Older posts” button over and over again and then scroll back to the way top. Then they remember they did clicked a video in the middle as it has started making some sound. The loop starts all over again, you start scrolling down to find the video that is playing in your news feed and could not find it because by the time you scrolled down, there are 23 more unread updates, waiting to be read.

Confusing, eh?

In case you need a better way to watch videos shared on your Facebook news feed, try the Facebook Video player chrome extension. This extension adds a video pane on the right of your regular Facebook news feed, so you can watch the video in the right pane and scroll through the news feed, while the video is buffering

The sheer advantage is that the video can be played anytime, and you can continue liking, commenting, scrolling or move back to your profile. The video is going to stick at the overlay window, unless you click the small cross button at the right corner of the page.

This is indeed a nifty way to watch Facebook videos in a clutter free environment, while keeping tabs on your friends updates, commenting on status updates and doing other Facebook activity. This extension is a must, if your internet connection is slow and you don’t want to buffer the same video more than once.

Facebook video player is a free download, ideally suited for video addicts who watch dozens of videos from their Facebook news feed, every single day.

Related: How to download videos that are shared on Facebook

A Better Way to Watch Videos On Your Facebook News Feed originally published on Ampercent

Let’s say you are a German citizen and have subscribed to updates from the Facebook page of Google. You want to read the posts in German but the content posted at the Facebook fan page is in English.  You can neither read and understand the content of the post, nor respond to all the comments or replies that have been posted in another language you can’t read.

Of course you can use Google Translate and other language translation websites to manually translate a post but why take that extra effort when Facebook has enabled language translation engine by default.

Facebook has recently partnered with Bing Translate and is now offering inline language translations for posts and comments on user fan pages. Using this service, users can easily enjoy public posts on any Facebook fan page, regardless of the language the content is posted in. If you are the creator or administrator of a Facebook page and want to provide users the ability to translate page content to their own languages, here are a few things you have to do:

1. Login to your facebook account and browse to the Facebook fan page you have created.

2. Click “use Facebook as page”

3. Go to “Your Settings” and choose “Allow translations from Admin, community and machine translators”

When a user whose account language is different from the language of the Facebook post, arrives at your Facebook fan page – he will see a “Translate” link as shown below:

Clicking the “Translate”  button on any post or comment will open a Bing translation pop up window. Users can either submit their own translations or use the Bing translation engine to translate the content of a post or comment to a language of their choice.

I tried this feature on the fan page of this blog and I was shown a “manage translations” box where I can submit a translation to the Microsoft Translation engine. Cool!

No Translation apps or browser plugins are required to use the translation feature of Facebook. It is however important to note that the translate link will appear only if

• The page administrator has enabled the Bing translation engine for the Facebook fan page.
• Your account language is different from the language of a post or comment you are currently reading on the Facebook page. For example: If your account language is Espanol and a post is published in Spanish, you will not see the “Translate” link under posts and comments. You will however see the translate link under posts that are written in any other language other than spanish.

Please note that this feature is enabled only for Pages right now, not for Facebook profiles or timelines.

Tip: Add inline language translation to your website using Google Translate Ajax API

Facebook Now Allows Inline Language Translations For Page Content And Comments originally published on Ampercent

Another thing regarding third party Facebook apps is that they are excessively self promoting in nature and sometimes, they might post a message on your Facebook profile. This can lead to sudden embarrassment because you don’t want to shout on the people who removed you from their Facebook friend list.

“Which of my friends removed me from Facebook”, “Why do some of my friends unfriended me on Facebook” – are some of the common questions of excessively addicted Facebook users who take this online life a little bit too seriously.

If you are one of them and want to find out who removed you from Facebook, here is a neat trick you might want to use, without using any third party Facebook application.

1. First, you have to activate Facebook timeline on your profile. Facebook timeline is your life on the web, a virtual storybook of all the events and old memories organized in chronological order. Facebook timeline is still walking its early baby steps and will be brought in effect from September 28th, 2011.

But if you want to get Facebook timeline on your profile right now, here is a step by step guide at Cnet

2. Once you have access to the new Facebook timeline, take the tour and edit your timeline as you want it to look like. Do not hit “Publish” until you are done experimenting with it because once the timeline is published, all your friends will see your Facebook timeline, whenever they visit your Facebook profile.

Here is how my Facebook timeline looks like:

3. One of the hidden features of Facebook timeline is that it reveals which of your Facebook friends deleted you from their Facebook friend list. Scroll through your timeline and you will find a couple of sections labelled “You became friends with X number of people”,

Click the “Friends” link and there you have it. You will see an overlay box which will show you the Facebook profiles of all the people, with whom you were friends at that time. If you are still friends with them, you will see the label “Friends” beside their profile image.

However, if these people have deleted you from their Facebook friend list or contacts, you will see a label as “Add Friend”.

The above scenario is also true if you deleted these people from your profile, so it turns out that this method works both ways. However, if you are not the type of person who frequently cleans up his Facebook friend list every now and then, this can be an easy way to find out the people who were friends with you earlier but are no longer friends with you right now.

Your Facebook Timeline Tells You Who Unfriended You On Facebook … Sort Of originally published on Ampercent

Timeline – The Way You Wanna Share Your Life

A complete new approach to tell your story. Story of your life (or the life you lived after you joined Facebook). With all places you’ve been, the movies you watched, the songs you listened, the food you ate/cooked, the mood swings you’ve had and even the trails of your morning walk, it’s a complete new look at who you are. Archiving every detail of your life you’ve shared on Facebook is what the new Timeline is introduced for. The whole idea is based on the idea of Information Designing. An Infographic of your Life.

With all the apps at your service the story you tell will be more of a visual experience for the friend who’s interested.

Interesting. Isn’t it?? Try out the new Facebook Timeline.

The “More” Social Apps – The Reason You Are On Facebook

With a better Open Graph, the future Facebook apps are going to make your Facebook experience more *social*. As Spotify CEO Daniel Ek truly remarks, finding music is best while browsing through friends’ collection. That is what Facebook social apps is all about. No more liking a book, a movie, a song. The experience is more real, more human. You can now read a book, watch a movie or listen to a song. Or in easy words, say what actually do. Not just saying, with the new range of apps, your friends can do the same things with you. They can too listen to the same song you are listening now, share their views on it or recommend you a better one. That is the power of networking.

With pattern recognition the apps will have better control on what to recommend for you based on what you have done earlier. Find what’s best suited for you, you are likely to get exposed to a whole new horizon of songs, movies, books, news, places etc you would not have found otherwise. Facebook has not only announced this feature but also to demonstrate a way to what’s best, have partnered with some of the giants in the above niche. With Yahoo, Spotify, Netflix and plenty more the service is going to be bigger and better. A smart move that will set high standards for apps to come.

Integration of all this likes to your timeline is under your complete control making it even easier for you to express yourself in a much better way. All this with nothing but a touch of a button named Add to Timeline.

Sharing being the focus of all the above experiment, you do not have to worry about the annoying pop-ups from the apps you love. Pop-ups that tell you to share whatever you have used that app for. It will now be auto-posted. Saying this, it may feel that the news feed is going to get more cluttered with apps your friends use. Wait, it won’t be. This will be there on the newly introduced ticker to the right. However if a pattern is figured out that may be of your interest, the update might also get placed on your main feed.

The Final Conclusion

All said we better not forget the annoyances Facebook has created in the past. But the change definitely promises to be more engaging and adds a more personal touch. Think of this, when have you last enjoyed a song with that friend from school? You can feel that fun again. The move if executed properly will definitely catapult Facebook higher in the social industry ladder. No wonder, it is always better to do things that you love with people whom you love or people who admires your choice. At the end of the day that defines the social game.

The New Facebook – A Complete New Way Of Sharing And Telling Who You Are originally published on Ampercent

Gone are the days when you would spend half a day managing all your online friends into separate groups so that you can share specific posts with a specific set of people. Almost every other social site has a “Friend list” feature but I am very sure most users are way lethargic on creating friend groups and customize their sharing habits. As far as Facebook goes, you can create friend lists but most of the friends I know of have never really found the time to act upon it.

This is because people are way busy doing stuff and they don’t really have enough time doing these things. If you have 825 friends in Facebook, 2365 friends in Google plus and 500 followers in Twitter, creating and maintaining those ever expanding friend lists are going to be too hectic.

Facebook knows this too, which is why the social giant is all set to release automated smart friend lists for every Facebook user in a few weeks from now

In coming weeks, Facebook will gradually roll out automated smart friend lists on your Facebook profile. These lists will be created automatically, depending upon your connections, sharing habits, common attributes and other signals. Here are some noteworthy points regarding new Facebook friend lists and how they will divide your friends into separate groups:

Smart Lists On Facebook

Smart lists on Facebook are made from the information available on your profile. Facebook will automatically scan the profile bio of your friends and find related matches. Examples include common school, college, office location, previous employers, present home town, relationship status and so on. In short, smart friend lists on Facebook will contain those people whom you know in real life but have lost track of them and haven’t met in years.

As far as I know most users, they are inclined towards people they know in real life and want to connect with them on social sites. Smart friend lists will contain your co-workers, school friends, college associates and colleagues so you can share specific updates with only school friends and prevent office colleagues from seeing that update, photo or video you just uploaded.

Close Friends and Acquaintances lists

Contrary to school friends and co-workers, often you will end up being friends with someone you don’t know in real life. You met this person in Facebook and found that both of you are insanely crazy over Basketball. The friendship grew and both of you often exchange private messages, wall posts and comments in each others status updates.

That’s a very close relation, despite of the fact that you don’t know this person and you will never meet him in real life.

Here comes the “Close friends and Acquaintances lists” on Facebook, which will sort your friends according to the frequency of connections.

The “close friends” list will consist of friends with whom you frequently exchange messages, IM conversations and comments. Facebook knows that you are interested in this person, even if you don’t share a common attribute e.g school, work, education, home town and so on. This is useful, because you can quickly filter out important updates from people who matter and ignore rest of the stuff you are not interested in.

Personalized Lists

In addition to “smart lists” and “close friends”, Facebook will also offer personalized suggestions, thereby suggesting you people whom you should add to a list. For example: if you’re friends with John and John is very close to Harry, Facebook might suggest you to add Harry to “John’s connections”, if and only if Harry is friends with you on Facebook.

Personalized lists help a lot when you want to tweak the finer details of an auto generated Facebook friend list by removing or adding specific people from the list.

What Happens to Old Friend Lists?

They stay intact and you may continue to use them as you like. The auto generated lists will not  overlap and are completely independent in nature, so they won’t disturb your existing friend lists on Facebook.

The biggest problem of managing Facebook friend lists is that you have to manually add each and every friend to a list, when you get more friends. After a couple of weeks, you are fed up of adding random people to a blocked list and the result is that you end up seeing or reading a lot of unnecessary, meaningless updates. When the auto generated friend lists are imposed, I guess users will have one click ways to filter updates, photos, videos and posts from specific group of friends. Saves time and you have to do nothing at your side!

This should not be confused with Google Plus circles, which is again purely manual in nature. Good job Facebook!

Facebook To Introduce Automated Smart Friend Lists In Coming Weeks originally published on Ampercent

However, there can be some caveats of this mobile upload email address, if you forget it or accidentally share it with a friend or a third party website.

The other day I lost my mind and shared my unique mobile upload email address for Facebook with a third party site, in exchange of a free Facebook Tee shirt. After a few minutes, I discovered that the site is offering nothing and is purely a survey scam. Since I had already shared the mobile upload email address with the spammy survey site, they were frequently uploading random photos directly at my Facebook profile. This is a big security risk and here is how I found a way to deal with the situation.

Recover Or Reset Your Facebook Mobile Upload Email Address

The best way to prevent that spam site from uploading photos to my Facebook profile was to change or reset Facebook mobile upload email address. If you have forgotten your Facebook mobile email address or want to change it to a new one, here are the steps that needs to be done:

1. Login to your Facebook account and go to facebook.com/mobile

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will find your older Facebook mobile upload email address, as shown below:

3. To change this and get a new mobile upload address, click the “Find out more” link.

4. This will open a small browser overlay window with some tips and instructions. To get your new Facebook mobile address and clear the last one, click on “refresh your upload email”

5. Click “OK” and you will be prompted to confirm your request.

6. Note that after resetting your personal upload email address for Facebook, you will no longer be able to upload photos, videos and post status updates to your Facebook account with that old address. You have to use the new address, which Facebook will provide once you hit “Reset”

7. Once Facebook has changed your personal upload email address, you should copy it to your address book or request Facebook to send it at your primary email address.

Please note that you can only reset your personal upload email address a limited number of times.

How To Change Or Recover Your Facebook Mobile Upload Email Address originally published on Ampercent