When you later decide to change your age you will notice that this is not possible right away. First you will probably search for options to select a different birthday. When you finally find out that the option is available under Edit Profile, you will notice that the birthday is not editable there. You can open that page right here to test it for yourself.

Why is it blocked? The most likely reason is to block users from changing their birthday from changing it whenever they feel like it, and to block minors trying to make themselves adults on the site.

This is however a issue if you have accidentally selected the wrong birthday. How can you change it if not in the Facebook profile?

The only way to change your date of birth on Facebook is to contact the Facebook support team to make them change it for your.

Facebook has made available a form for that request which you can access here.

Here you need to select the new birth date and enter a reason for the change. The most likely reason is that you have made an error during account creation. It is likely that the first request will be granted if you use that reason for changing the birthday.

There is no telling how Facebook will react if you use the form multiple times throughout the years. It is likely that they will deny the second or third request unless you provide them with a very good reason for the change.

Many smaller more subtle changes have also been introduced in recent times. The Pokes feature for instance has been removed from the homepage. It was previously displayed on the right side of the Facebook page. And while it is still possible to poke users with a click on the “more” button on their profile page, there is no real visible option anymore to look at the received pokes.

For those who do not know: Pokes are a basic way of saying “hi” without actually having to type anything. It is an option to express affection and interest in a person.

Here is a screenshot that highlights where you find the poke option on old Facebook profiles.

And here is a screenshot where it can be found on new Facebook Timeline profiles.

The pokes page on the other hand is not displayed anymore on the profiles page or any other page by default. Let me explain to you how you can get it back to your news feed page on Facebook and all other pages of your Facebook profile. Take a look at the following screenshot to see where the Pokes link will be added to on your profile page.

All you need to do is to visit the Pokes page on Facebook. When you do that the Pokes link will automatically be added to the sidebar menu. It is displayed under the Apps category afterwards.

You can alternatively right-click it and select Add To Favorites from the menu to add it to the Favorites listing at the top of the page.

Another alternative is to bookmark the pokes page directly to open it whenever you need to look at the pokes that you have received in the past.

Users who have not changed their profile yet may still encounter timeline profiles, as it is up to each individual user if they keep on using the old profile or if they have already switched to the new profile.

It is however not possible to switch back from the new profile layout to the old one. Once timeline has been activated, there is no turning back.

There is however a workaround for users who do not want to see timeline profiles on Facebook. Please note that the workaround will change the layout of all profiles that you personally visit on Facebook to the old profile layout. Other users who do not make use of the workaround will still see the timeline profile.

Firefox users need to install the extension User Agent Switcher, which can be used to trick the Facebook site into believing that a different browser is used to connect to the service.

Locate the User Agent switcher icon in the browser bar. If you do not see it right-click on a toolbar, select customize from the context menu and drag and drop the User Agent icon to one of the visible toolbars.

Click on the icon afterwards and select the pre-configured Search Robots > Internet Explorer 7 entry. Facebook will now believe that you are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser to connect to their site. The effect is that you will see only old profiles and not the new timeline profile view.

Please note that this leaves an ugly large blank area at the top of the profile.

Chrome users can use the built-in option to override the browser’s User Agent. A click on the wrench icon, and the selection of Tools > Developer Tools or the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-J open to the developer toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Click on the wrench icon in the lower right corner of the screen and locate the Override User Agent option under Network.

Select Other from the menu and paste the following information in the field on the right:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)

Note that Chrome will identify as Internet Explorer 7 on every site you visit until you deactivate the option again. An alternative is the creation of a new browser startup shortcut on the desktop.

Right-click the shortcut and select Properties from the menu. Append the following parameter after chrome.exe (leave a blank between).

--user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"

You can now use the shortcut whenever you want to access Facebook, and the normal shortcut that identifies the browser as Chrome when you visit other web pages. (via PureInfoTech and Caschy)

Update: Check out the Facebook Purity script to get rid of the blank space at the top when you are using the IE7 user agent.

And with multiple popular services doing this, it may quickly become a control issue. It is not that sites like Facebook or Twitter are hiding the pages where apps that have been authorized in the past are listed, but it still requires the user to know that a page for managing app permission exists.

My Permissions is a free web service that offers two core features. It first links directly to the app permission management pages on eight social networking sites. Included by the service are Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Linkedin, Dropbox, Instragram and Flickr.

A click on a button opens the app settings control panel of the selected service in a new tab. You may be asked to log in first before you can manage app permissions. If you are already signed in, you can edit or remove app permissions right away. It usually takes a single click to remove an application from the list of connected apps.

You can naturally bookmark the links right away to open the app permission pages right away without having to visit the My Permissions page first.

The developers have created an ifttt recipe that reminds users once per month to check app permissions on social networking sites that they use.

If you are a heavy app and social networking user you may appreciate the service. Everyone else can still use it to check which apps have been authorized currently. (via Caschy)

Social Fixer, previously known as better Facebook, introduces dozens of changes and feature additions to the Facebook web page. The majority of changes can be activated individually which leaves it up to the user if a particular feature is changed on or added to Facebook.

When you install Social Fixer in your browser you are asked if you want to start with a minimal version or the complete package. The minimal version makes only slight changes to Facebook and keeps most features deactivated. Users can then open the extension’s options that are displayed directly on the Facebook page to modify Facebook page elements selectively. The program runs a setup wizard after installation which informs the user about the core features that it provides.

The program lists dozens of preferences in the options. Take a look at the following screenshot that is showing the options in the Firefox web browser.

The extension even comes with a search to find options quickly. Options are displayed in groups like layout, display, chat or theme that all display multiple preferences.

Here is a list of some of the options that the extension offers:

• Show full image previews when hovering your mouse over pictures
• Disable the “Lightbox” (aka “Theater”) photo viewer popup
• Change font size to px for posts and px for comments
• Fix “Enter” key behavior to be a newline when adding comments, rather than submit
• Lock the blue header bar at the top even if the screen is small
• Reorder posts to be chronological and hide “Top Stories”
• Add “Reply” links to comments and float the reply box up to the comment
• Show “Friend Tracker” to get Unfriend notifications
• Display the “Control Panel” at the top. It can be used to mark messages read, reload or mute all.
• Hide the Ticker Feed of friend activities (Hide Facebeook Ticker)
• Hide friends’ real-time Game activity
• Hide the “Top Story” triangle indicators in the upper left of posts
• Fix timestamps to show actual date/time (“one hour ago” becomes “12:34am (one hour ago)”)
• Automatically mark a post as “read” after commenting on it
• Auto-expand comments on Questions post pages
• Left align the page rather than center
• Show old stories as grayed out rather than hiding them completely
• Turn off the chat sidebar on the far right (if it exists) and go back to popup chat list
• Group friends by online status (active on top, idle below)
• Install themes or skins on Facebook
• Enable Filters to hide specific post types in the news feed
• Add custom CSS styles

Those options are just the top of the iceberg. Social Fixer is a handy extension for Facebook users who want to modify the Facebook page to their liking. It is particularly effective in removing annoying page elements like the Facebook Ticker.

Social Fixer is available on the project website for all supported browser versions. It is also directly available on the respective add-on repositories.

An alternative is the userscript Facebook Fixer.

One could say that you better pick your friends carefully on Facebook, but we all know that this is not always possible. Facebook fortunately has implemented an option called tag reviews which allow a user to review tagged photos before they become visible on the Facebook profile page.

To enable tag reviews on Facbeook, you need to click on the down arrow in the main toolbar next to your user name and the Home link and select Privacy Settings from the menu that opens up.

Locate How Tags Work – control what happens when friends tag you or your content, and click the Edit Settings button next to it.

This opens an overlay menu with five options to change.

• Profile Review of posts friends tag you in before they go on your profile (note: tags may still appear elsewhere on Facebook)
• Tag Review of tags that friends want to add to your posts
• Maximum Profile Visibility of posts you’re tagged in once they’re on your profile
• Tag Suggestions when friends upload photos that look like you
• Friends Can Check You Into Places using the mobile Places app

Tag Review is the second option in the list. Just click on the arrow icon next to it to turn it on. This displays an informational page where you can turn on tag reviews on Facebook.

Once you enable the feature you will receive notifications whenever you have been tagged by another user in a photo. You can also turn on the Profile Review feature to approve or deny being tagged in friend’s posts that are displayed on your own profile.

Lastly, you can change the maximum profile visibility for posts that you are tagged in. You could for instance make it only visible to yourself, to friends or a specific group of users.

Making the changes to the tag privacy settings can really improve your privacy on Facebook and reduce the amount of unwanted posts and notifications that appear on your Facebook profile page. (via)

To make matters worse, there is no option to halt, disable or hide the ticker on Facebook. Some Facebook users think that this is an oversight on Facebook’s part.

When you look at the Userscripts website you will notice more than a dozen scripts that promise to remove the ticker from Facebook. I have tested about six and noticed that many did not work properly. I finally discovered the Facebook Side Ticker remover userscript which works exactly as advertised.

It automatically hides the news ticker on all Facebook pages. All that you need to do for that is to install the userscript in your browser.

I have only tested it under Firefox, it is however likely that it will work under Google Chrome and Opera as well.

Firefox users need to install the Greasemonkey or Scriptish add-on before they can install userscripts. Once done all that is left to do is to go to the Facebook Side Ticker website on the official Userscripts repository website to click on the Install button there.

The ticker on the right side is hidden automatically most of the time. I experienced one or two situations where it remained on page after the page loading finished. A simple reload of the Facebook page was then enough to hide the ticker again.

I suggest you give Facebook Side Ticker Remover a try if you are annoyed by Facebook’s new real-time ticker.

Facebook yesterday announced a change that aids users in this regard. The top stories from the last day, or another time period, are now shown at the very top of the news feed. Users who spend most of their day on Facebook will still see the old layout with the most recent news on top.

The blog post over at the Facebook blog does not reveal much about the algorithm that determines if a story should be displayed as a top story on Facebook. One element that is likely playing a role is the ability to dismiss a top story. It is likely that Facebook is using those information to promote future stories.

Each top story on Facebook is indicated with a blue corner. A click on that corner dismisses the story and removes the top stories indicator.

The second addition is a real-time news ticker that is displayed in the right sidebar on the Facebook site. This basically returns activities of a user’s Facebook friends in real-time.

Ticker shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook, but it brings your conversations to life by displaying updates instantaneously. Now when a friend comments, asks a question or shares something like a check in, you’ll be able to join the conversation right away. Click on anything in ticker to see the full story and chime in – without losing your place.

The idea to filter news posts by importance makes sense. The algorithm on the other hand may need some tweaking as it seems to promote stories that one would not necessarily call important. I for one would love to see a language and content filter to fine tune the top stories selection. This could allow users to block certain types of stories, e.g. photo uploads from being promoted to top stories on Facebook.

The primary email is used for all communications, for instance notifications that someone messaged you or that a user logged in with your account from another computer. If you do not have access to your primary email anymore you will not receive those notifications and communication, unless you change it on Facebook.

Changing Your Facebook Email Address

You can only change your email address on Facebook if you can still log in on Facebook. Sign in as usual and locate the Account link at the top right corner of the screen. Click on Account and then on Account Setting under the Context Menu.

Locate Email under the Settings tab (which is the default tab) and click the Change link on the right of the preference. Your primary email address is listed on that screen.

A menu looking similar to the on shown on the screenshot below should be displayed on the same page when you click on the change button.

All email addresses connected to this Facebook account are listed there. If the other email address that you want to use on Facebook is already listed, select it and click Change Contact Email.

This makes the selected email address your primary email on Facebook.

If the email is not there, enter it under New Contact Email and click the Add New Email button afterwards.

You are asked to enter your Facebook password to confirm the change. If you enter the right password, a confirmation email is send to the new email address. It contains a confirmation link that you need to click on to confirm that you have access to the email address. If clicking does not work copy and paste the link in the email to your web browser and activate it that way.

Facebook sends a second email to the current primary email address. This contains information that a new email address is about to be added to the account. This email contains a link to cancel the operation, so that the new email address is not added to Facebook.

New emails that you add and confirm are not added as the primary email by default. You need to go back to Settings > Email to select the new email address under Contact Email. A click on Change Contact Email opens the password prompt again where you need to enter the Facebook password again to confirm the change.

The selected email should now be displayed as the primary email on Facebook. You can use the Remove links next to all emails but the primary email to delete it from the account. You need to confirm the removal of email addresses with your password.

It is not really clear why they are not sending out invitations instead, which would give every friend the choice to either join the new group or ignore the invite to not join the group.

It is apparently only possible to invite friends into new Facebook groups. If you visit an old group page on Facebook you will see the following paragraph at the top.

Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format. When this group is archived, its wall posts, photos and discussion threads will move to the new groups format, but group members will need to be re-added.

The new Group page it links to offers little information about the new group concept on Facebook. It is only possible to automatically add friends to new groups on Facebook. The old concept was to send friends invitations if you wanted them to join a group on Facebook.

The new group concept is obviously flawed, considering that the majority of Facebook users are not only friends with their closest friends and relatives, but with many different users of the social networking site.

This may open the door for spam or even malicious attacks in form of phishing links or software downloads. It does not necessarily have to go that far, but being a member of a group that you do not want to be part of may be be reason enough to be against the new group concept.

How can you stop people from adding you to Facebook Groups automatically? The short answer is, you cannot. The only option you have is to leave the group and contact the friend to let them know that you do not want to be part of the group. If you get re-added, your only option is to leave again and / or remove the friend who has added you from the friend list.

Here is how you leave groups. Click on Groups on your Facebook profile page. The groups link is located near the top right corner of the page.

There you see a list of all groups that you are a member of. To leave a group, hover your mouse cursor over the group. A blue x is displayed next to the group. Click on the x to leave the group.

You will get a remove group membership confirmation prompt. Select Remove if you are sure and want to leave the selected group on Facebook.

Have you been added by friends to groups automatically? How have you handled this?

Update: Some users think that this article is misleading, as it is not answering the question they came here for. Here are several options that users in the comments have pointed out:

• You cannot be re-added to groups if you leave them, so this might help.
• You can create or subscribe to a lot of bogus / empty groups to reach the group limit. Once you do you cannot be added anymore to new groups.
• And finally: Communicate with those friends that add you to group ans see if you can get them to stop adding you to groups. If you cannot, you should consider unfriending then on Facebook as they cannot add you to groups if they are no longer your friend.

There you have it. Three perfectly fine answers for the issue at hand. It would obviously be better if Facebook would give users an option to accept or decline group invites, but since that is not an option right now, your only bets are the options listed above.

You may have noticed the chat interface in the lower right corner of the Facebook website. It indicates that you are online, and displays the number of friends that are online and available for chat.

A click on the chat indicator expands the interface. All online Facebook friends are now shown along with a link to friends lists and the options. The easiest way to drop out of chat is to click on the small green and white switch that you see next to Other Friends. If you click it you go offline and none of your friends will see that you are actually online and available for chat.

You can alternatively click on Options > Go Offline which sets your status to offline until the next time that you click on chat.

The two options so far are there to go completely offline on Facebook, so that no one can see that you are online. Some Facebook users may prefer to stay online for select friends, and offline for others.

Enter Friend Lists. You can create Friend Lists on Facebook group your friends. You may want to create a group for your family, one for work or school, and maybe another for your football buddies or poker group. You can then select to be online or offline for each individual friend list that you have created.

You create a new friend list with a click on chat and the selection of Friend Lists at the top of the window.

Enter a descriptive name for the new group and hit return. It should now appear in the chat listing. Move your mouse cursor over the new list and select the edit link next to it. Edit only appears if you mouse over the new group.

Facebook displays all of your friends in a new overlay window. You can add friends to the selected group with a click on their profile photo. Once you are done click the Save List button to save the list.

You can now go offline selectively so that selected friends will see that you are online and available, while others won’t see that you are online on Facebook.

Have another Facebook tip to share? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Facebook has changed the chat layout recently. You now need to click on the options icon at the bottom row of the chat bar and select Limit Availability from the options.

Facebook displays an overlay window on selection that looks like this.

Here you can then limit your availability by selecting the user groups that you want to be visible for. For that, you need to create friend lists. You cannot do this anymore in the chat interface. For that you need to click on the Friends link in the upper left corner of your Facebook page and then on the Manage Friend List button at the top.

You can then click on the Create List button near the top to create new lists or add friends to existing lists.

Most Facebook users have friends who spam the news feed with silly game and application updates or other unimportant updates. Facebook has implemented options to block specific single updates or all updates from a user or application.

Lets take a closer look at how you can block these updates from appearing in the Facebook News Feed. For this, I have taken a post from Ghacks writer Mike Halsey as an example, and I hope he does not mind.

When you move the mouse in the area of the news feed update, you will notice an x in the upper right corner of the update. If you left-click on the x three options appear:

• Hide this post: Hides the selected post from the news feed, but will allow all other posts by the friend to appear in the news feed.
• Hide all by (username): Hides all posts from the user immediately. This means all posts of the friend are removed from the news feed, and no new posts will be posted on the feed in the future.
• Mark as spam: If a post is spam, i.e. advertisement, you can mark it as spam.

There may come a time where you want to display a Facebook friend’s post again. To do this you need to scroll to the bottom of the news feed page on Facebook, and click the Edit Options link there.

This opens an overlay with a list of all friends that are currently hidden in the news feed.

You can use the add to news feed button to add their posts to the news feed again. There is also an option to enable hidden applications from appearing in the news feed again.

Facebook distinguishes between friends which are Facebook users that you personally have invited or accepted as friends and people which are all Facebook users.

It is possible to block people in Facebook. People in this regard can be friends or users that you do not have any relationship on the social networking site with.

This can be helpful if you get harassed or flooded with spam messages by someone.

Blocking users on Facebook

Open the Facebook website and log into your account. Now click on Account and then Privacy Settings in the upper right corner of the screen. You can access most privacy related settings and options on this page including the Block List at the end of the listing.

Click on the Block List entry to open a search form where you can search for a person or email address. It helps if you know those information. Facebook will automatically displays a list of matches in a popup window with friends matching the search phrase listed on top of the listing.

People you have blocked will not be able to interact with you on Facebook. Any Facebook friendships or relationships you currently have with that person will be broken. Note that blocking someone may not prevent all communications and interactions in applications, and does not extend to elsewhere on the Internet.

A click on the Block button next to the users will block that user from being able to access your profile at all. Friendships will be revoked as well if the user is a friend of yours on Facebook.

Blocking users is on the other hand not an ideal solution. The blocked user could create a new Facebook account and access the profile information again.

This leads directly to the privacy settings of the public Facebook profile. You should visit the page to make sure that only information that you are comfortable with is shown on the public page. You can edit those settings in the Personal Information and Posts of the Privacy Settings.

You should also take a look at the contact information settings to control how and by whom you can be contacted.

This concludes the tutorial on how to block people on Facebook. If you have additional tips let us know in the comments.

Some might want to do so on the other hand for various reasons. Facebook Video is a Firefox add-on that is currently in experimental stage that can be used to download, convert or embed videos from Facebook.

The add-on adds a few new options to video pages, wall and inbox. It does that in a very unobtrusive way and the new elements look like they have been there all the time. Video pages will contain links beneath the videos to download a video from Facebook to the computer or to convert the video from flv format at Zamzar before downloading it. The very same pages display the embed code to embed videos outside of Facebook and the public link to the video to send to contacts.

The Wall and Inbox on the other hand will contain options to download, convert or embed only. Facebook Video is not the only Firefox add-on that can download those videos from Facebook. Download Helper is another add-on that supports Facebook and hundreds of other websites. It can be downloaded without having to log into the Mozilla page which users would have to do for the Facebook Video add-on because of its experimental stage.

Facebook Video was developed as a userscript for Greasemonkey first which can also be downloaded and used. This is noteworthy because these scripts can usually be added to other web browsers like Opera or Internet Explorer as well.

Update: The Facebook Video Downloader for Firefox is no longer available at the official Mozilla Add-on repository. I suggest you use the excellent Download Helper extension instead which is linked in this article as well.