Once upon a time in a pre-Facebook age, other social
networks dominated. In those times MySpace sold for $580 million, was
later valued at $12 billion, and had 100 million users...and boy was it ugly.
Users had full freedom to change their pages into psychedelic
monstrosities, proving once and for all that the general public lacks
design sense. Then Facebook came along and stole all of MySpace's thunder, in part by creating a consistent look across all users' pages. It was so consistent, in fact, that any little change to the Facebook interface sent users into paroxysms of angst, vowing to leave the service. (Witness the public horror when people were forced to accept the Facebook Timeline as a replacement for their previous Facebook profile.) Facebook had 1.11 billion users as of March 2013, according to its first quarter results, so uniform pages seems to fly just fine.
Still, there are so many things about Facebook's layout that rankle users. Go to Facebook.com and you immediately see your News Feed—but not everything your friends post. That's because Facebook frequently defaults the page back to "Top Stories," which uses its own algorithm to determine what you want to see. It's usually wrong. Change it to "Most Recent" (on the desktop, just click "Sort" under the status box). But guess what—even "Most Recent" doesn't show you everything. The only way to keep tabs on your friends thoroughly is by visiting each individual Timeline—or as some people like to call it, stalking.
There are ways to default to "Most Recent," and there are some nice ways to improve your Timeline's imagery—so all your friends will want to visit it more regularly.
Customized Timeline URL
Before you do anything else, reserve your Timeline name. That way your URL is simpler to share and you can tell people to go to www.facebook.com/egriffith instead of a string of numbers.
All you have to do is visit www.facebook.com/username to get it. If you haven't done so already, it's likely your name is taken. Try it and you'll get the usual variations offered, like your name followed by some random numbers.
Want to change the actual username on your account? This is where many people make a grave mistake. On Facebook, you get to change your username exactly once. After that, you're stuck with it. So choose wisely young grasshopper.
Facebook Cover and Profile Pictures
Changing your Profile Picture—the little square image that represents you on the site—is a breeze. On your desktop computer, go to your Timeline and hover the cursor over your image. "Edit Profile Picture" will pop up. When you click that you can upload a new photo, select from your photos already uploaded to Facebook, take a new photo with your webcam, or edit the thumbnail image from that photo so it looks better when you comment or send messages.
With the advent of the Timeline Facebook offered another way to express yourself: the Cover photo. Like with your profile image, hover over the big image (or blank space, if you haven't created one) to upload a new picture or choose an existing one. Note that using gigantic images can slow down the loading of your page, even though you may only be able to display a small piece. The size of a Cover image defaults to 851-by-315 pixels. If you upload something smaller, it'll stretch to fit (and the minimum is 720 pixels wide anyway). Resize your image before you use it if you think load time is important.
Also note that your Cover image must be a .JPG or .PNG. Use the latter if you're doing something involving logos or fonts; it'll look better. And keep in mind that using any image as a Cover immediately makes it public. Anyone who finds your Timeline can see it, even if they're not a friend.
There are plenty of third-party Web services out there for creating and editing the perfect 851–by-315-pixel Cover banner. For example, the Aviary Editor Facebook App is right there on Facebook to help you turn your existing images into the perfect-sized Cover. Just go to Crop, then Presets, and you'll see Cover as an option. Save it to your photo albums for easy access.
Also check out Pizap, Timeline Cover Banner, and CoverJunction for other options, even creating banners from scratch. I particularly like Pic Scatter, which creates photo collages from your images.
There are also several iOS and Android mobile apps for editing Facebook Covers. Jeego's Cover Photos for Facebook is on both platforms, and provides new images to use every week.
Fixing Facebook With Social Fixer
This is where things get sticky. As mentioned, Facebook thinks it knows best when it comes to interface—and it goes to great pains to make sure users have an identical experience. This goes hand-in-hand with a very important factor: Facebook wants you to see advertisements. It's the core of its business. It provides a free social network to keep up with friends and family, but in exchange it tracks everything you like and tries to show relevant ads.
So when an amazing tool like Social Fixer comes along and messes with that even in the littlest way, Facebook gets controlling.
Social Fixer is not a Facebook app; it's actually a browser extension that works with all browsers—Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or via Greasemonkey scripts. (Okay, every browser except Internet Explorer.) But the control it gives you over the Facebook interface is pretty amazing. It can default your News Feed to showing "Most Recent" all the time; it lets you set up tabs so you can organize the News Feed into categories; it'll filter the News Feed so you can always see, or always hide, posts with certain words (like "Sox" if you're a Yankee's fan, or vice versa). You can hide posts after you read them, read exact timestamps of posts (rather than a generic "7 hours ago"), and hide part of a page (like birthday notifications). It'll change your Timeline from a two-column layout back to a one-column version like the old interface. It'll even let you MySpace it up a bit by changing the default color scheme and font sizes, and hide hashtags if you find them annoying.
These are all amazing things and come highly recommended. But Social Fixer used to have a couple of other killer features: the ability to see when someone unfriended you, and to hide sponsored stories and advertising. Facebook didn't like that and killed the Social Fixer Facebook page—the method used by Social Fixer developer Matt Kruse to keep in touch with its more than 500,000 users. Why? First Facebook said it was because Social Fixer was used for spam. Then it said Kruse was reported for violating the Facebook Terms of Service—which is pretty hard to believe since as a browser plug-in, Social Fixer isn't really under that control. Ultimately, Facebook asked Kruse to remove certain features of Social Fixer and if he refused, threatened him with legal action. Kruse backed down, removing the ad hiding (which you can still do with AdBlock) and the unfriending notifications. (Facebook reasoning: that's a negative experience; it wants Facebook use to be positive.) Even after complying, Facebook did not restore the Social Fixer Page on its own service.
Facebook has a long history of getting rid of services or software that show who unfriends you, but one that apparently still works is Who.Deleted.me. Log into it with Facebook to get started; but you can't share it on Facebook because the service marks it as malicious.
There's another browser extension (for all but IE) with a similar approach to helping Facebook users called F.B. Purity. Facebook legal is also after them, so get your customization extension while you can.
What About Facebook Pages?
Ah, well, that's a different story. A Personal Profile is for the general user, but it is different from a Facebook Page, which is for a business, brand, or organization. Here's an example. These are the kind of pages you'd "like"—and the kind of pages that Facebook wants to keep happy. Thus there are many third-party services that make it easy to customize them. Some are free (like the tools from North Social) but most of them charge a monthly fee. You can find a big list of helper apps for Pages here.
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