How To Block or Unfriend Someone On Facebook

From a friendship turned sour to an annoying ex, there are plenty of people in your Facebook circle you might want to prevent from being able to see your activity. While shunning a person in real life requires a variety of tactics, blocking or unfriending a Facebook friend that’s fallen out of your favor can be quite simple. Use this guide to prevent unwelcome nosey parkers from snooping on your profile. 

 1. Navigate to your profile by tapping your name at the top right.

2. Scroll down to your Friends section at the left and click  to open it.

 

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3. Search for the offending frenemy.

4. Hold your cursor over that person’s name.

 

5. Hover over Friends in the balloon that appears. This will bring up a dropdown menu.

 

6. Click Report/Block from the dropdown menu.

 

7. Select Unfriend. You can also click Block or Unfollow on this pop-up, depending on your preference. Unfriending a person will remove him or her from your friends list and he or she won’t be able to post on your timeline or see anything that’s not public. If you want to un-do this, you’ll have to go about sending a new friend request. Sadly this will telegraph to them that you had unfriended them. 

If you block someone, you won’t be able to see any hint of them, including comments your ex-friend makes on other people’s activity. But it’s easy to unblock them quickly if you regret your decision. You can Unfollow a person to stop seeing updates from them without completely cutting them out of your digital life. 

8. Click Confirm > Okay. 

 NOTE: You can hide individual posts from a person from within the news feed. Simply click on the top right corner of any status update. Then click Hide. 

Cherlynn joined the Laptopmag team in June 2013 and has since been writing about all things tech and digital with a focus on mobile and Internet software development. She also edits and reports occasionally on video. She graduated with a M.S. in Journalism (Broadcast) from Columbia University in May 2013 and has been designing personal websites since 2001.

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Strikingly review: Make mobile-friendly Web sites with your Facebook profile and a click

Strikingly Free Strikingly makes building a slick-looking website a breeze. Its one-click feature, which takes content from your Facebook page and turns it into your personal website, is especially valuable.

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Facebook contains plenty of your personal information, but having a Facebook page is a far cry from having a personal Web site. Unless you use Strikingly, a cool Web site building service that pulls data from your Facebook account and uses it to create a slick-looking Web site you can call your own.

Strikingly builds your Web site very quickly.

Strikingly is easy to use, especially if you rely on its one-click feature: Give it permission to access Facebook and it does all the work for you. It pulls relevant data from Facebook, such as your profile picture, work experience, and places of residence, and arranges that into an attractive Web page that you can customize—to an extent. Strikingly lets you add and remove sections to the site it builds using its intuitive editing menu. Freelancers and job seekers will like how easy it is to add a section highlighting work samples, while parents and photo enthusiasts will like the ability to quickly add a photo gallery.

If there's no quote on your Facebook page, Strikingly will add one to your site for you.

The site Strikingly built for me was close to something I’d actually build for myself—if I had the technical knowledge to do so. I liked the way it presented my basic bio and work experience, though I could have done without the screen-wide image of purple flowers sporting a quote about the joys of dancing in the rain. Strikingly says it will pull in a quote you’ve posted to Facebook; if you’ve left that section blank—like me—it supplies a quote for you.

Strikingly’s dashboard lays out the tools you need to build your site.

Fortunately, it's not that hard to change. I was able to easily delete the flowers and replace that section with a photo gallery of my favorite Instagram shots. I really liked how this gallery looked on the published site, especially when scrolling through the photos. You can add photos from a variety of sources, including your own computer, Facebook, Flickr and Picasa—though I found it slightly odd that I had to go back in and add the Facebook photos manually. Given that Strikingly pulls so much of your info from Facebook, I’d hoped it would pull more photos than just my profile picture. The company says its one-click feature that builds sites from Facebook is still in beta, and it plans to add more photo capabilities in the future.

I also wish Strikingly had a preview feature, and didn’t push me to publish the site without previewing it first. Of course, you can see what you’re creating on your computer screen, but I always like the ability to do a final check before making anything live on the Web.

Strikingly does have nice touches that professionals will appreciate, such as the ability to edit your site’s Meta tags, and to add actions specific to the mobile version, such as dialing a number or launching a map. And it’s a bonus that the mobile version of your Strikingly site looks pretty darn slick, too.

You can easily add or remove sections from your personal site.

Strikingly is free if you use to create one site smaller than 5GB in size with a Strikingly domain (though you can customize it). An $8-per-month Limited plan ups the limit to 50GB and supports 2 sites, as well as the ability to connect a custom domain. The $16-per-month Pro plan supports 3 sites, unlimited bandwidth, custom domains, and more. The free version doesn’t display ads on your site, which is a really nice touch, though it does feature Strikingly’s branding. The Pro plan lets you remove that branding.

Strikingly limits you to creating a site using the building blocks it provides. It likely won’t appeal to the super techie folks who want control over every aspect of their personal Web site. But for anyone with a Facebook account and a desire for a simple way to create a pretty Web site, Strikingly is worth a look.

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Review: TimeRabbit tracks hours lost down the Facebook rabbit-hole

It's sobering just how much time you can waste, um, I mean, spend on Facebook. TimeRabbit tells you just how bad it is. Install this free utility, and it will track every second (and minute, and hour) you spend on the world's most popular social network.

TimeRabbit ticks every second you're on Facebook.

TimeRabbit requires little interaction on your part: It really is set-it-and-forget-it software. Once you install it, TimeRabbit automatically tracks how much time you spend using Facebook.

And "using" is the key word here: TimeRabbit figures out when you're active on Facebook, as opposed to when you have it open in a browser tab that you're not actually looking at. That's thanks to its code, which monitors your browser's activity to see whether the current URL address includes "facebook.com". If it does, TimeRabbit starts the clock, and the tally grows..

TimeRabbit works with all versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and with versions 7,8, and 9 of Internet Explorer. In my tests, TimeRabbit worked seamlessly with all supported browsers, accurately (and sometimes scarily!) tracking the time I spent perusing Facebook.

TimeRabbit tallies your recent time on Facebook.

Unfortunately, TimeRabbit doesn't work with IE 10, which is the latest version of Microsoft's browser. Developer Breakpoint Software Development says lack of support for IE 10 was an oversight, which the company plans to remedy in a future release.

For a more detailed look at your Facebook usage, TimeRabbit offers historical stats, which let you see how much time you spent on Facebook in the past day, week, and month, and lets you compare that to your current usage. The stats are basic, not highly detailed, but they will prove useful in seeing trends over a short period of time.

Breakpoint developed TimeRabbit mainly as an experiment, and it's really a just-for-fun application. But it's eye-opening too, especially for those of us who may spend a lot more time on Facebook than we think. Install it, and you may find out that means you.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
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Review: Get those precious Facebook moments backed up sharpish with PhotoGrabber

Making backups of everything you put online is always a sound policy. You never know when a site is going to get hacked, shutter their virtual doors, or just decide to shut down your account for whatever reason. One site that makes data backups a really good idea is Facebook.

PhotoGrabber's list of Facebook friends and pages puts you first.

Although they are not likely to shut down their site anytime soon, Facebook has been known to shut down user accounts without warning for some perceived infraction of the rules. In instances like this, a free open-source app called Photograbber would be a good thing to have in your back pocket.

I prefer similar program fbDownloader because it feels easier to use and is a little more flexible as to what you can download. But PhotoGrabber still has its pros and is definitely worth looking at, especially if you have a soft spot for open source software.

Unlike fbDownloader, PhotoGrabber does not ask you to type in your password, and instead relies on an authentication token issued by Facebook's API. This means that you can revoke PhotoGrabber's access at any time by going to the list of approved apps in your Facebook account and deleting it. This is PhotoGrabber's first big plus, as I am always leery of entering my Facebook password anywhere but the official site.

PhotoGrabber then generates another "login token" which you must enter into the app for it to work. Unfortunately, you need a new login token for every download you want to do. If you want to download from several friends for example, then it shuts down each time and you have to restart it and enter a new login token again. It's rather annoying.

When you enter the login token, you will see a list of all your Facebook friends, Facebook Pages you have subscribed to, and you will be at the top of that list if you want to download your own stuff. FbDownloader doesn't include Pages, so this is a point in PhotoGrabber's favor. Simply choose the person or page you want to download from, specify what you want to download and off you go.

Every time you want to use the app, the developer's site generates an authentication token, which you must put into the app for it to work.

This is where I have to make one rather large caveat.  Even though some of the photos may be publicly viewable, you may not be able to download them using PhotoGrabber because a user has the ability to block apps, including PhotoGrabber, from viewing their data. So PhotoGrabber can only "grab" what it is allowed to. So if you see 300 photos on the page, but PhotoGrabber only gives you 200, then that's why.

The major reason I prefer fbDownloader over this app is because PhotoGrabber is rather restrictive when it comes to you specifying what you want to download. For example, it's either download "all the albums" or nothing. In fbDownloader, you could choose which albums you wanted. Here, you get the whole lot.

But the biggest plus for PhotoGrabber is that you can pull in all the comments and tags.  If you choose this option, then PhotoGrabber generates an HTML page so you can view this information alongside the photos. This in theory means that you could back these pages up to your own personal domain as another online backup.

PhotoGrabber is under active development.  If you make backing up something of a religion, then PhotoGrabber is a tool you should use on a continual basis, as well as keeping an eye on the project page over on Google Code.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate for your system.

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
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How to Add a Cover Photo to Your Facebook Timeline

So you’ve finally taken the plunge, hitting the “Get the new Timeline” button that forever commits you to the new chronological-style Facebook profile. One of the major differences between Timeline and the old-school profile style is the addition of a cover photo. This is the first thing your friends will see when they view your profile, and it provides an opportunity to add a bit more personality than just that smaller-sized profile pic below.

To change your cover photo, move your cursor over the cover photo canvas on the top of your profile page. Select Choose from Photos if you want to use an image that’s already on Facebook, or pick Upload Photo if you want to add a new picture.

If you’re experimenting with different images, you’ll quickly realize that there’s an optimal photo size for the Timeline cover photo. The exact dimensions are 850 x 315 pixels (8.5 x 3.2 inches), but you can also crop a larger-sized image. Once you find a photo that works, click Save Changes, and your friends will get to see a whole ‘nother side of you.

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Hands-On: Google Plus Redesign Apes Facebook, In a Good Way

Google is rolling out a new design for Google+. You may already have this clean, easy to navigate look, which definitely improves the user experience. The three column layout with an optional chat column to the very right is very reminiscent of the layout of Facebook. Unlike the News Feed of Facebook, you’ll actually find yourself wanting to take some time to read the posts on the Home page of Google+ instead of just scrolling to the bottom to glance at what you’ve missed. 

The new layout stays true to Google’s minimal design aesthetics. The font is modern. The colors are basically different shades of gray. When you hover over areas like the Trending section, it softly glows a different color. The large open spaces and simple font makes posts easy to read and it does not feel overwhelming in the way the Facebook’s Timeline can sometimes be. The menu bar is now on the left side of the page as a part of the new dynamic dock. You can drag the features you want to and from the more tab in the dock.

On the top of the right column of Google+, you’ll now see what’s trending on the social network, as well as tabs for Hangouts, You May Know and You Might Like. Each of the categories only has a few, well-spaced items that is helpful when you need it but is not in your face about its presence. This bar also scrolls off the page as you scroll down, instead of following you and forcing you to connect with people and topics.

But the design is just the beginning of the changes. We went hands-on with several of the new features.

Trending on Google+ is a really great way to catch up on current events and topics. You can click on a trend and sort it by Everything, People and pages, Google+ posts, Sparks, Hangouts, From your circles, From you and From this location. You can further choose how you want to see the trending posts by choosing between Most recent and the Best of. The Best of shows the posts with the most amount of +1’s.

As trending posts pore in, the news feed updates in real time. This can get really overwhelming real quick. Luckily, Google has put in a pause button at the top so that you can pause the timeline.

[Top Six Facebook Annoyances and How to Fix Them]

The Explore section uses a slider for controlling the amount of posts that show up in your Home page. Reminiscent of a cleanly designed news app, you can get lost here easily, discovering cool articles in all different topics –like news of the weird, serious journalism, photo journalism, music videos, and great YouTube finds. We’d love to see a feature that lets us curate this area to our particular interests.

The new Google Hangout was obviously designed for collaborating on projects instead of pure socialization. They’ve added such features as Google Doc and Google Sketchpad integration, and even made it possible to add a phone call to the chat. You can also share your screen with other people in the Hangout. You can share documents, or YouTube videos, or even games with this feature.

We love the new design of Google Plus, the new ways to consume the news through trending topics, and the integration of other Google services in the new Hangout.  At the end of the day, looking at Facebook feels like snooping while looking at Google+ feels more productive. Currently, the Google+ crowd seems to share more professional stories and finds. Most people probably will not ditch Facebook but Google+ does give you a fresh start in terms of who to follow and who to friend.

You’ll be seeing more of us on Google Plus in the near future.

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Breaking: Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion

Facebook just announced – in a post on Mark Zuckerberg’s profile – that it has bought Instagram for $1 billion dollars in cash and shares. This is Facebook’s largest acquisition to date, coming just ahead of its highly anticipated IPO.

Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, assured fans in his own post that Instagram will remain running and the service is “not going away.” It’s been 551 days since the addictive photo app and social network was born, and the company still has only 13 employees.

Instagram investors have just gotten very lucky, too. According to CNN Money, the company had raised $47 million in venture capital funding — including a recent $40 million round in new funding  – bringing the total valuation up to $500 million last month. This means that investors have just gotten a 2x ROI in a few short weeks.

Regarding the app’s evolving features, Zuckerberg says, “We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.”

via Facebook and Instagram Blog

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Look Who’s Stalking: 10 Creepiest Apps For Phones, Facebook, More

Thanks to the ruckus surrounding “Girls Around Me,” we now know how easy it is for apps and other services to repackage our personal data for disturbingly creepy ends. The Girls Around Me app might be the latest report to blow up in a big way over this issue, but it certainly hasn’t been the first. Here are the top 10 creepiest apps and services we’ve heard of in the past few months.

Girls Around Me was an iOS app that leveraged Foursquare data to detect women who have checked into a user’s neighborhood. Dropping their pictures as pins on a Google map, the app let its users leisurely peruse a directory of local ladies, and after they picked one who piqued their interest, they could tap on her picture to connect to her Facebook account, see her full name and profile pictures, or even message her within the app.

Although Russian-based app developer i-Free has contended that it hasn’t done anything wrong -- all of the data it was dishing out to users was unrestricted information, voluntarily provided by Facebook and Foursquare users -- the app’s stated goals and purpose have been suspect to say the least. “In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand?” the official website reads. “Girls Around Me puts you in control! Reveal the hottest nightspots, who’s in them, and how to reach them…”

Since news of the creepy service broke, Foursquare cut off the API access that the app relied upon to function, prompting developers to pull the product from the iTunes Store.

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