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.

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

So what do I mean by this and why?  Well times are still hard and for all those people struggling in their jobs, or struggling even to find work after being made redundant employers are increasingly searching Facebook and Twitter for clues as to the types of people that they are hiring or that are already working for them.  Couple this with the fact that Twitter is and has always been completely public, and that Facebook seems to find ever increasing ways to make everything you say and post publicly available, and you could find yourself going into the new year with a problem.

I’ve recently gone through my Facebook account and deleted all the photo libraries I put online this year from holidays and days out.  Let’s face it, each of these were only supposed to have been there for a few days, a couple of weeks at the most, so that my other friends could catch up with what had been going on but nobody would have looked at them since.  I’m extremely careful about what I put on Facebook, for instance I tend to avoid photos where I’ve had too much to drink (though the obligatory Saint Patrick’s day hat photo will always remain a notable exception!) but even so it’s wise to be cautious.

Facebook are currently rolling out their new Timeline feature that they dub “a new kind of profile”.

Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual.  The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.  As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

In short Facebook want everybody’s profile to be a complete history of their lives and do you really want all of this information available to everybody, and trust Facebook to keep it secret?  This is why I highly recommend not just removing old photos but modifying your status history as well.  Not that long ago Facebook offered a new feature that can be found in your Privacy settings called Limit the Audience for Past Posts.  Here you can control your privacy better for all the things you have said in the past, some of which you may not be completely proud of.  All of this is in the name of being constantly careful and vigilant about the company’s proclivity to make everything public as often as they can.

With Twitter it’s different because everything is already public.  Deleting old Tweets is a laborious process of removing them one at a time (I have almost 7,000 tweets in my account and don’t want to face that!) but some tools such as TwitWipe are available to plug the gap.  This and similar services will completely wipe your Twitter history, enabling you to start from scratch with a clean bill of health.  That means the next time someone does a search online for your Twitter handle and the word “drunk” nothing will appear in the results.

Personal privacy is something we’re giving up more and more as we get involved with social networks and companies that trade online, but it’s such an important thing to guard.  Making sure that my privacy is maintained online will certainly be one of my resolutions for 2012, will you make it one of yours?

A direct link to Facebook’s Messenger has now been posted on the Windows Club website. Windows users who install the client on their system need to connect the program with a Facebook account before they can use its functionality.

A click on log in opens the Facebook website in the default browser. Here it is then necessary to log in, the client will automatically recognize the log in. Facebook notes that users need to enable the “keep me logged in” feature if they want to use the messenger after closing the browser.

Facebook Messenger looks like a bare bones version of Firefox. Users see three icons at top which indicate friend requests, messages and notifications. Facebook Ticker information and contacts are displayed below.

Chats open in a new window that is using a tabbed interface to separate different chats. The program is bare bones otherwise at the moment. The only other options provided are displayed in the system tray icon’s right-click context menu. Here it is possible to dock the Facebook Messenger window to the right of the screen, and to turn off sound notifications.

Facebook Messenger did not work on a 64-bit version of Windows 7. The client worked fine on the other hand on a 32-bit version of Windows. It is not clear if the software is only compatible with 32-bit versions of Windows, or if a setting on the 64-bit test system caused the incompatibility. The player opened fine, but log in was not recognized on the 64-bit system.

Facebook users who use Windows as their operating system can download the messenger from this link.

A word of advise though: there does not seem to be a way to go back to the old profile once Timeline has been activated. The options at least do not list a setting to revert the profile to the old one.

The profile has been revamped completely. The name indicates already that information are now displayed in a timeline on the profile page.

Basic information, like the user’s name and occupation, profile photo, a large image, friends, photos, and likes are displayed near the top. The current and last month, and years are displayed on the right ready for selection. You can use the selection menu to list activities of a friend in a particular year or month.

The timeline begins after that header section. The profile page highlights recent activities at the top and not so recent ones below that. One interesting addition is the activity log which highlights all user activities on a single page. Here it is also possible to hide news and activities from appearing in the timeline. A filter at the top offers to filter activities by subject, e.g. to only display likes, photos or comments.

The privacy options come with a new setting to change the visibility of old timeline posts to friends only (even if they have been public before). This is done under Privacy Settings > Limit the Audience for Past Posts.

The visibility of each post or activity can be changed on the profile page as well. Just hoover the mouse over a post to display the settings menu there. You have the option to feature posts, or to edit or remove them from the timeline.

Facebook users who activate the timeline profile can edit the new profile page for seven days before it becomes visible to everyone else. This has been implemented to give users enough time to make modifications to the information that are displayed on the profile. Users who do not want to wait that long can publish the timeline profile whenever they are ready to do so.

What’s your take on the new profile? (via)

The flaw was first reported on the forums of BodyBuilding.com, presumably because the users of that website like taking photos of themselves and putting them online.  The bug exploits the way the offensive photograph reporting tool works.  I’m not going to detail it in too much detail here because I don’t want to encourage anybody to try and view photographs that other people have made private as they obviously want them to be kept private.  However the post does detail how the flaw works.

ZDNet used the flaw to show a picture from Mark Zuckerberg’s private album, taken from a dinner party where everybody seems to be having lots of fun making the food, it’s quite sweet actually as Zuckerberg clearly looks like the shy one.

Facebook have said they are looking into the issue which revolves around being able to report more than just the single photo you can see.  It’s not a bug with the system but it is quite a substantial design flaw and, oddly, surprising that nobody has noticed it before.

Facebook has been heavily criticised in the last few years for matters of privacy and so there are people who will leap on this story as yet another example of how the company simply doesn’t take its users privacy seriously.  Such problems have included a change to the terms and conditions that made all your photographs and statuses Facebook’s property and a settings change that made everything on everybody’s profile accessible to search engines by default.  Both times the change was quickly withdrawn.

ZDNet said…

Details of this flaw were examined in detail. While some browsers restrict this flaw, private photos that are hidden or inaccessible to people who are friends, can not only be accessed but enlarged to their full scale.  This flaw is open for anyone to use — and abuse. While Facebook anonymises the reports that it gets through, the user whose profile pictures can be viewed will also not know that their privacy has been invaded.

There are real problems with privacy and the Internet, much of which seems to stem from people not understanding what the Internet really is and how it works.  I have published a free Facebook Privacy Guide, though some settings have changed and the book needs a second edition when I get time.  There’s lots of advice in here though about how to keep yourself and your personal information safe and private when online, at least as safe and private as Humanly possible.

As is always the case with these things the best advice is not to put embarrassing pictures or messages online in the first place, or to remove them after they’ve been seen by close friends.  Some companies are working on solutions including one ingenious one I’m looking forward to where a picture can be programmed to expire after a specified time.  These types of technology will no doubt help all of us in the future.

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.

The majority of methods use JavaScript to trigger the functionality. The issue here is that external scripts increase the page loading time. If you load to many scripts, your website could be punished for this by the search engines by reducing the page’s position in the rankings. Depending on the number of social media buttons that you embed, you could be loading multiple external JavaScript files.

But JavaScript can also be used for tracking purposes. Visitors who load a web page with external JavaScript will always at least pop up in the external service’s access logs.

The only positive effect for the webmaster is that users can vote for their articles on the linked social networking sites. But this is also achievable without JavaScript. The benefit of that solution? Faster page loading times and guaranteed no user tracking.

The following solution has been created by Daniel Pataki. It is a solution for WordPress, if you use a different script or software you may need to modify the code accordingly.

The code consists of two parts. First CSS code that you need to add to your blog’s stylesheet, and then the code that displays the links to the social networking sites on the website.

CSS Code:

You need the following sprite image that contains all four icons. This speeds up the loading time as only one image needs to be loaded instead of four separate ones. Place it in the /img/ directory of your theme folder or alter the background:url code to place it somewhere else.

.social_icon {
background:url("img/sprite.png");
display:block;
width:33px;
float:left;
margin:0 3px 0 0;
height:32px;
opacity:0.8;
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
}
.social_icon:hover {
opacity:1;
filter:alpha(opacity=100)
}
.social_icon.twitter {
background-position:-33px 0;
}
.social_icon.googleplus {
background-position:-99px 0;
}
.social_icon.print {
background-position:-66px 0;
}

WordPress single.php code

You need to add the following code to WordPress’ single.php file.

<div class='social'>
<a href='http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php the_permalink() ?>' class='social_icon facebook' rel="nofollow"></a>
<a href='https://twitter.com/share?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>' class='social_icon twitter' rel="nofollow"></a>
<a class='social_icon googleplus' href="https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="nofollow" ></a>
<a href='javascript:window.print()' class='social_icon print'></a>
<div style='clear:both'></div>
</div>

The functionality should be available immediately. Users who click on a social networking icon are taken to the selected site where they can post about the web page that they have originated from. The page url is automatically included in the post.

I hope this helps some of you out there who want to offer functional social networking buttons without the JavaScript.

Update: Have added rel=”nofollow” to all external links.

Soon, there will be another distinction. Facebook is currently rolling out a new feature that they call sponsored stories. These sponsored stories tie in with Facebook’s social advertising strategy. Businesses can promote their services on Facebook with the help of this new feature.

Several friend activities can trigger a sponsored story: page likes, page posts, page post likes, check ins, app shares, apps used and games played, and domain stories.

Here is how it works. A company decides to promote their products or services on Facebook. When one of your friends on Facebook triggers one of the actions above, a sponsored story may appear in your news ticker. Facebook gives one example on the Sponsored Stories for users faq pages:

For example, if your friend likes the Starbucks Page and a story about it is published in your News Feed, you may see a Sponsored Story about it if Starbucks has opted to promote it.

When you look at the Sponsored Stories for Businesses and Organizations, everything becomes clearer.

Sponsored Stories allow you to surface word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand that exist organically in the Facebook News Feed. To promote your Page, you can use Sponsored Stories to surface both Page Likes and Page Post Likes. For example, if a person’s friends like a Page, in addition to potentially seeing that news story in their News Feed, they can now also see the same story on the right-hand column on Facebook. Additionally, if you create a Page post and someone likes the post, this story can now appear on the right-hand column as well as in the News Feed.

The big issue here is that the ads do not look like advertisement at all. Take a look at a sample that you can create when you try to create sponsored stories as a business or organization.

It basically states[friend's name] likes [business name].

Facebook users who do not want to see sponsored stories or the Facebook ticker on Facebook can install browser extensions or userscripts to disable the feature.

Firefox Share has been designed to give users a tool at hand to share links faster. The new Mozilla Labs add-on places an icon into the Firefox address bar upon installation.

This icon can be clicked to share the current website address.

The Mozilla Labs team has added three sharing options to this initial version of Firefox Share. Firefox users with the add-on installed can share a link on Twitter, Facebook or Google Mail.

Each service needs to be authorized first before they can be used to share links. A click on the sign in button opens a popup window where this is done.

The authorized service window displays the sharing options then on successive uses. Tabs that have been open before the initial authorization need to be reloaded before they can be shared.

The share overlay displays the user account and the web url in a form by default. It is possible to add text and even modify the web address before hitting the share button. Depending on the service, it is furthermore possible to change the message recipients (for instance from public to direct message on Twitter).

The announcement over at the Mozilla Labs website describes the add-on as a “descendant of F1″, Mozilla’s social add-on (you can read about Mozilla F1 here). Plans are to make it different from F1, for instance by adding many different providers to future versions of the extension.

Probably the best feature from a user perspective is that Firefox now communicates directly with the service providers and not through a Mozilla proxy. If you are a Firefox users you can download Firefox Share from the official Mozilla add-on repository. (via)

The sudden drop, reported by Dvice, showed a huge surge in traffic last month of 1,200% but now a significant drop.  It’s entirely reasonable that people who already have a Google account would pop in to Google+ to have a look, but this figures suggests that perhaps Google aren’t offering them enough to stick around.

What a social network really needs, almost straight off the bat, is a huge number of users.  This is the only way to compete with Facebook which at last count was approaching 750 million users.

Some people are saying that Google+ simply doesn’t offer enough to stand out from the social network competition, but that it’s also likely that Facebook now has such a stranglehold over its users, with many people now devoting more time to it each evening than to other activities including television, that it needs to be more unique.

It is clearly though far too early to pass judgement over Google+, despite the problems that Google has had trying to launch social networks in the past.  Also a 60% drop might be very significant, but when Google was reporting 20 million users three weeks ago, it still leaves a very healthy volume of users to build on.

So which social network do you use, if any at all?  Why not tell us in the comments here.

This falls in line with the finding that Facebook does not delete all cookies on a user system during sign out.

I reviewed several browser extensions and add-ons to deal with the privacy issue, Share Me Not for Firefox for instance is one of them.

Priv3 for Firefox uses a very similar concept to improve a user’s privacy on the Internet. The developers of the extension note that Priv3 “does not block third-party interactions completely”. It instead “selectively suppresses the inclusion of third-party web cookies” when the browser connects to the social networks.

Instead of blocking or removing the social scripts outright, it basically blocks their functionality until the user makes the decision to interact with them. With the add-on installed it is still possible to see the number of likes, Twitter messages or +1s a page has received.

When you start interacting with a social networking script on a site the extension starts to reload the session cookies to pass on the click to the social networking site so that the desired action can be completed (e.g. liking a page).

Priv3 in its current state supports the three top social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as well as LinkedIn. The developers promise to add support for additional sites in future releases.

The extension works similar to Share Me Not which uses a similar technique to block privacy sensitive data to be transferred to one of the social networks. Firefox users can install Priv3 from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

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)

According to Nik Cubrilovic though this is not the case. Facebook can track logged out users as much as it can track logged in users. How do they do it? With cookies of course. One would assume that logging out would delete all cookies linked to the account.

This is apparently not the case here. Facebook is not deleting all cookies when a user logs out. Nik notes:

To make it easier to see the cookies being unset, the names are in italics. If you compare the cookies that have been set in a logged in request, and compare them to the cookies that are being unset in the logout request, you will quickly see that there are a number of cookies that are not being deleted, and there are two cookies (locale and lu) that are only being given new expiry dates, and three new cookies (W, fl, L) being set.

Cookies that identify the user based on the account number still exist, which means that Facebook has access to that data whenever a connection to the site is made (on Facebook itself or third party sites). This means that Facebook can still identify users even if they are logged out of the social networking site.

The only solution? To delete all Facebook cookies whenever possible. While you could do that manually every time you log out of Facebook, it is probably not the best solution in this case. First, you have to do it every time which can quickly become a nuisance, and second, you have to remember to do it.

Here are a few add-ons and extensions that take care of that for your:

• Facebook Blocker [Firefox] – Blocks all Facebook contents on third party sites from sending information. You can still interact with the elements if you want, but until you do, no information are submitted.

Facebook Disconnect [Google Chrome] – Blocks all Facebook traffic from third party sites.

• Facebook Blocker [Opera] – Seems to be identical to the Google Chrome extension, blocks all Facebook third party traffic.

Have another add-on or tip on how to cope with the situation? Let everyone know in the comments.

Update: Facebook responded in an email. Here is their official statement:

Facebook does not track users across the web. Instead, we use cookies on social plugins to personalize content (e.g. Show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do (e.g. Measure click-through rate), or for safety and security (e.g. Keeping underage kids from trying to signup with a different age). No information we receive when you see a social plugins is used to target ads, we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.

Specific to logged out cookies, they are used for safety and protection, including identifying spammers and phishers, detecting when somebody unauthorized is trying to access your account, helping you get back into your account if you get hacked, disabling registration for a under-age users who try to re-register with a different birthdate, powering account security features such as 2nd factor login approvals and notification, and identifying shared computers to discourage the use of ‘keep me logged in’.

Friendly Gaming Simplifier is a free extension for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers that make gifting and receiving gifts and bonuses a lot easier. The add-on supports many different games on Facebook, including the immensely popular Farmville, Mafia Wars, Texas Holdem Poker and City of Wonder and Frontierville games. You can access the full list of supported games on the developer website.

Here is how it works. You install the extension for your browser from the developer website. The extensions do not seem to be available on the official add-on repositories, which means that caution is suggested when installing them in the browser.

The extension adds a single button to the browser toolbar. A click on the button and the selection of Open Giftlist loads the main interface in a new tab.

You see the list of available games first. Here you select the games that you play or want to play. For each game you can select specific actions, like auto like or send actions, notifications when bonuses are available or being listed on neighbors searches.

You can then use links at the top to access the pending bonuses and bonuses with action required, the collected bonuses and pending and collected gifts. Other options included sending free gifts to friends or clearing the bonuses history.

One of the effective actions of the extension is the ability to get all bonuses or gifts at once instead of individually.

Facebook users who like to play a game or two on the social networking site might want to try Friendly Gaming Simplifier to speed up receiving gifts and bonuses in the games that they play.

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 new Facebook subscribe button supposedly takes care of this by providing users with better news feed controls. The button will appear later this week on profiles of friends and other users provided that they have activated the feature for non-friends.

The button serves three main purposes according to Facebook’s Zach Rait, who posted the news on the official Facebook blog.

The button can be used to choose what Facebook users see from people in their news feed, to read news from users who are not friends and to provide others with options to read your news if they are not your friend.

The subscribe button when opened can be used to configure which news appear in a user’s news feed. This ranges from all updates over most updates to important updates only. There are further options to select the types of updates that should be posted to a news feed. This can be status updates, photos, games or live events.

Facebook users who do not want anything to change can just ignore the button to receive the same amount of news as before.

Subscribe buttons will also be displayed on other people’s pages, like journalists, political figures, celebrities or artists. The subscribe button can be used to subscribe to the news that get posted by that person. The news are then automatically integrated into the standard news feed on Facebook.

The new subscribe page offers information about the procedure. It is an opt-in process which means that users need to enable it on Facebook before it becomes available on their profile.

What’s your take on the new subscribe button on Facebook?