John Lacey » Facebook

How To See All Your Facebook Friends In News Feed

John Lacey — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:41:41 +0000

Facebook has an annoying habit of making big changes very quietly. Certainly my experience of Facebook lately had felt very quiet, a lot of posts on my news feed from the same handful of people.

Turns out under new Facebook settings your news feed will show only people you interact with most (rather than all your friends) by default. If you want to change this go down to the bottom of the news feed and click on Edit Settings…. and change it.

Facebook Page

John Lacey — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:13:26 +0000

It’s fitting that I covered Julia Cameron’s thoughts on ‘real’ writers earlier in the week. I had my own personal variation on this theme. I had created a Facebook page about, well, what I showcase here – information about creativity, my own videos, photographs, writings and art. When I created the account I told Facebook I was a ‘writer.’ Much to my horror after the page was created the word ‘writer’ morphed into the word ‘author.’

Perhaps it’s a purely semantic game, but to me ‘writer’ and ‘author’ mean related but different things. An author is someone with a published book, surely? A writer is just someone who writes. I write, indeed I blog. It seems a silly reason not to make the Facebook page public but it was enough to keep it private for several months.

Today I decided to make the John Lacey Facebook Page public. There you will find photographs, artworks, blog posts, the Creative Concepts videos and more. If you’re interested you can ‘like’ the Facebook page here.

I must admit it was a little surreal looking at the Facebook newsfeed and seeing this…

Finally I just wanted to say thank you to Cynthia Harrison who has this amazing gift for leaving incredibly supportive messages on this blog on days when I’m struggling with things. Cynthia is the author of Your Words, Your Story – a wonderful primer on writing that takes into consideration a number of genres and styles of writing. Be sure to check out her blog too.

Facebook and Friendship

John Lacey — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:03:15 +0000

There are as many uses of social networking services as there are users using them. While it can be tempting to assume that Facebook for example is just about playing Mob Wars and collecting ‘friends’ as if they were Pokemon (a notion popular with some media outlets), many people use such services to have heart felt interactions with people they care about. Sometimes these are interactions that due to a myriad of reasons – including geographical distance – just can’t happen by any other means.

People, in effect, opt in to a relationship with you. And the flip side of this is that they can also opt out of that relationship at any moment. Sometimes they just won’t have the time to devote to that interaction. Perhaps their (if you’ll forgive the expression) ‘real life’ will obscure their need or desire for online communications. Perhaps they are suddenly without the means to access the Internet. Some people will decide that they are suffering from data overload and quit using the Internet altogether. Some people will decide they have no need for the particular website or service and delete their account or profile. And as the user, the consumer if you will, this flexibility is desirable and empowering.

But as someone left behind it can be bewildering and heartbreaking. It may be some time before you even realise that a friend has left your social circle. You may not have any information about their motivations for leaving. If you haven’t communicated with them via other means you may not be able to communicate with them again. And if they’ve decided to abstain from online communications altogether it won’t matter how many emails you send, you may be left forever wondering what happened to them.

I respect each individual’s right to use or not use these resources as they see fit. I would just hope that if those relationships mean anything to you at all that you offer some consultation before an abrupt departure.

Video Syndication

John Lacey — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:22:59 +0000

I’ve been doing something over the last couple of days that is unusual for me. I was hesistant to even bring it up because it sounds a little nutty. But basically I’m interested in… WORLD DOMINATION. Okay I’ve been watching too many episodes of Pinky And The Brain. I should probably take this back a few steps.

YouTube is the heart of my online video operations. It’s a good place to be. There’s a lot of traffic through that website and a community that has learnt to a greater or lesser extent to rate, comment and subscribe. Though if I’m being completely honest in some respects I’ve sometimes felt like a slave to YouTube, at their will and mercy. I decided earlier in the year that my content was my content (and that hopefully it had a value and merit all of its own, regardless where it ended up). So I decided 2010 would be the year I would start syndicating my video content more widely.

This has been a long time coming and even now is a race of ‘slow and steady’ movement. I started uploading JohnOfJordan videos to both YouTube and LiveVideo. (Though, honestly, LiveVideo does some pretty horrendous things to my video quality.) I then started a JohnOfJordan fan page on Facebook and was surprised to see that some people joined it. Uploading videos to Facebook is a pleasure and their video quality is beautiful. Facebook doesn’t require keyword tags either which is one less thing to think about. [As an aside I had never been a huge Facebook fan but I must say that their pages are amazing. I would probably use one over a NING Community, for example.] Then I uploaded some stuff to Vimeo. There’s a restriction on how much video you can upload to Vimeo in a week. This is sort of an incentive to upgrade to their premium services.

Even as I type I’m uploading a video to Tubemogul to syndicate it to other sites. Tubemogul is a great site where you can upload a video once and have it then be forwarded to a number of different video sites. (I especially recommend using their ‘BIG file uploader’ because it is resumable. If something happens with your connection you can hopefully pick up from where you left off.)

The goal here isn’t to build audiences on other video sharing websites. It’s really just about putting the content out in a lot of places to increase the likelihood of people stumbling upon it. And in some ways it’s about building incoming links to my websites (never forget to include a URL in your video descriptions so viewers can find out more about you).

I’ll be the first person to admit that a lot of the stuff I do has limited appeal. I’m not going out of my way to make people ‘like’ it. I doubt I could even if I wanted to. They’re going to watch it and reach their own conclusions. All I want to do is position my material in enough places that people are given the opportunity to make that evaluation for themselves.

Hide Annoying Facebook Applications In Your News Feed

John Lacey — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:46:19 +0000

I’ve often griped about Facebook. But the truth is once you deny access to 90% of the Facebook applications and hide anything ending with ‘Ville’ from your news feed, it gets back to being friends sharing thoughts and images with each other. And that is something I can appreciate.

Hide Annoying Facebook Applications In Your News Feed
You can’t control which applications your friends are using. But that doesn’t mean you should be notified every time they find a sad virtual animal walking across their virtual farm…

Simply move over the offending item in your news feed. You will see in the top right hand corner the word “Hide” will appear. Click on “Hide”. You will then be given the opportunity to either hide items from a particular person or those that relate to a particular application. Simply do this for each application you wish to remove from your news feed.

Check Your Application Settings
With a new year upon us it is worthwhile doing a quick spring clean of the Facebook applications that have access to your account.

Go to the “Settings” menu at the top of the screen and click on “Application Settings.” From here you are given the ability to sort the applications in different ways.

If there are any applications that you tried out for 30 seconds before deciding they weren’t for you, simply hit the little ‘x’ beside the application name. You will be prompted to confirm this action or cancel. (You are also given an opportunity to give the application a rating out of five stars to let other people know what you thought of it. This is optional.)

Facebook Statuses At A Glance

John Lacey — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:29:31 +0000

What follows is primarily for the benefit of Cynthia.

After you log into Facebook by default you will see the ‘News Feed.’ This is just an aggregated overview of recent items about your Facebook friends. This is just an overview and the results are somewhat arbirtrary.

In the top left hand corner of the screen you will see a number of options that let you filter the information in other ways. You can sort by the networks you’re a part of (in this instance, Australia because I am Australian), by recent photographs, links and status updates.

To see recent status updates, simply click on that option. You’ll be presented with recent updates from your friends, starting with the most recent ones.

If you get to the bottom of the page and want to see even older updates, simply click on ‘Older Posts.’

If one of your friends posts so prolifically that they’re pushing other people’s updates out of view, you can hover the mouse over the corner of their update and select the ‘hide’ option.

If you decide you’d like to show their updates in your feeds again, simply click ‘Edit Options’ [in the same bar that 'Older Posts' appears (see above)] and select the users you’d like to include.

I hope this helps. If you have any more questions please let me know!

John Lacey » Facebook

How To See All Your Facebook Friends In News Feed

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