Phil Bradley's weblog

Facebook introduces 'recommendations'

This was first announced back in autumn 2016, but I've only just seen it starting to happen in the UK on the desktop version of the site. Basically if you want thoughts, ideas, opinions and recommendations, Facebook can create a status update for you which does exactly that. 

As you can see Facebook is offering to turn recommendations on for this post. 

Clicking on that gives me the screen you can see above, and when I click to turn on recommendations, I get the following screen:

Once I confirm the location the status appears like this:

I can then click on my recommendation, and Facebook will attempt to find the location for the recommendation and put it into the status update as well:

I think it's a good idea - it's what we've always done in the past of course, but this is just a nice piece of functionality that allows us to make real use of it. At last! A Facebook update that improves the experience. 

Coloured Facebook status updates

Not content with driving users nuts with large font sized updates, Facebook is keen to frazzle our eyeballs with coloured background updates. They look a bit like this:

You can have flat colours or gradiated. Thankfully it's on Android users who can irritate the sh!t out of us at the moment, but it's going to be rolled out more generally in the coming weeks and months. Facebook is desperate to get us to update our status entries more often since we've been reducing this of late, and they can't have that, can they? Of course, it would help if people just didn't do it but I suppose that's rather too much to ask for really. The alternative of course is to just unfriend them, which if I see much more of it, I shall be sorely tempted to do.

However, there is another option, called FB Purity. It's a nice little tool you can download that allows you to view your Facebook feed in the way that you want, not how Facebook think you should. The most recent update consigns these irritating coloured updates back to the hells they came from. If it irritates you as much as it does me, you might be installing FB Purity in the near future!

 

How to see a list of people who have refused your Facebook friend requests.

Want to see what swines have refused your friends requests on Facebook? It's really easy to do it. 4 steps, 5 seconds ...

Step One

Click on the Friends Icon on your Facebook page, upper right hand corner. 

Step Two

Click on 'See All' at the bottom of the list.

Step Three

In the top left hand corner of the dialogue box that pops up you'll see an option 'No New Friends Requests' unless you currently have some pending. Below that, you'll see another option called 'View Sent Requests'

Step Four

Click on that, and you'll see a listing of everyone that you've sent requests to who haven't responded. You now have a nice list of people that you don't need to worry about sending Xmas cards to!

Changing the annoying Facebook font size

You may have noticed recently that some Facebook status updates are in a larger font size than you may be expecting. Facebook has - without really announcing it - added this as a new feature. If your update is less than 35 characters in length, it is presented in large font, like this:

It's a bit on the irritating side, especially if you're not aware that it's going to happen. There's a few things that you can do to ensure that this doesn't happen. First of all, add in more characters to get you over the 35 character limit. Second, add in an image. Third, add in a white space image, for those times when you don't have an appropriate image to add. One of those methods should do the trick for you.

Facebook account spoofing

There's been a rash of people discovering via friends that someone is pretending to be them. I'll explain why this happens and what you can do about it. First of all we need to be quite clear - that an account has NOT been hacked. If it had been hacked it would mean that someone had got into your account, could post on your behalf and do pretty much what they wanted. What's happening is that the account is being spoofed - that is to say that someone has created a new account and is pretending to be you. They will take a copy of your Fbook profile picture, and may try and copy other elements of the account, such as where you work etc. 

What they won't have is your friends who have linked to your account. This is where the scam starts. You may find that you get a notification from Facebook that So-and-so wants to be your friends, and this is a puzzle, as you're already friends. However you may think your friend has accidentally unfriended you, so you simply friend them again. What then happens is that they will contact you in Facebook messenger with good news - they've been awards $75,000 in some government backed scheme. The better news is that you also can get a share of the cash that's going begging. All you have to do is to go to a page on Facebook and register your details. After a while you'll get confirmation that you are on the list to win the $75K - all you have to do is to pay a small administrative fee to get the money unlocked and into your account. Of course, you pay up, and they take your cash, thank you very much and you never hear from them again.

This happened to me recently - a friend had her account spoofed. I was directed to a fake Facebook page, which is still there, despite being reported. Luckily I knew what was going on, so wasn't fooled. However, it's very easy to be taken in, so what should you do?

First of all, check to see if you are still friends with So-and-so. Just pop their name into the Facebook search bar, and they will almost certainly come up as a friend. At this point you know you're still friends, so the new friend request is a spoof request. You can just ignore it, or let your friend know, so that they can do a status update to tell the rest of their friends not to accept friend requests.

If you're still not sure - take a look at the account. How many friends does this So-and-so have? Is it less than you would expect? Are there details on where they work, previous postings and so on. Finally, if you still want to make sure, message the faker and ask a question such as 'how is ABC?' who is a friend that doesn't exist. They won't know, so will lie, making it clear that they are an imposter. Again, ignore the request, let your friend know, and if the faker has already got some of your friend's friends added, perhaps drop them a line as well. Also take a look at any Facebook page that is suggested. How many followers and likes does it have? What has it posted? Is the spelling correct?

As you can see, 2 spelling errors already. You could also take a copy of the image and run a reverse image search on it via Google Images. If you do that, you'll see that the guy in the picture is the American Politician Ted Cruz - hardly likely to be fronting a Facebook page about government employees. It's also worth thinking 'America?' How would you, if you're not a US citizen, be getting money from the US government? While you're looking at the page, simply click on the three dots on the profile image and report it as a spam account.

What if you've already accepted the request? No problem at all. They can't do anything because they are not hacking into the friends account or yours. Simply unfriend them, and that'll be that.

If you are the victim of having your account spoofed, what should you do? First of all, it's worth posting a message to all of your friends warning them that someone is pretending to be you, and not to be taken in by it. You can also report the fake account to Facebook, who may (or may not!) delete it. The other really important thing to do is to make your friends list private. If it's private the spoofer won't have a list of people s/he can contact, and they'll go off and look for another target.

It's fairly easy to do this. First of all, take a look at your security settings.

Then, click on 'Who can see my stuff'

Choose what do other people see on my timeline? and choose Public. That way you can see how open or closed your Facebook profile is. If you can't see your friends list, then you're already safe, and don't have to do anything. If the public can see your friends list, that's when you need to change it. Go to your profile page (you can do this by clicking on your name in the blue bar at the top of the screen. Then click on the 'Friends' tab. 

Then click Manage and Edit privacy

Then change all of the options you see to "friends".

At that point, you're done. Go back and check to see what your public profile looks like now, and you should see (or rather shouldn't see!) that list of your friends has disappeared.

Please note: this is how it works on a desktop or laptop, I've not tried it with mobile or tablet devices.

Breaking news!

While I was writing the blog post, I thought I'd leave a message on the fake Facebook page. "THIS IS A FAKE PAGE AND FAKE ACCOUNT. IT IS NOT REAL..." After a few moments, the thief (or attempted thief) got back to me. I've included the conversation so you can see exactly how this scam is supposed to work:

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY WHAT YOU ARE SAYING?

 

You're a fake page, trying to steal money from people

As long as the page is here, I'll keep warning people about it. You're already the subject of a blog post.

NO THIS IS REAL AND LEGIT JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU GET YOUR WIN MONEY

No, you're not. You're a fake account. Your spelling is poor, you don't have any likes or history of posting and the image you are using is Ted Cruz. This is as fake as they come.

AM HERE TO HELP YOU GET YOU WINNINGS

No, you're here to steal money from me.

You can't even speak correct English, it's 'your winnings', not 'you winnings'.

NO IT REAL JUST TRY AND YOU WILL SEE THAT IT REAL

I'm not American.

Why would the American government give me money?

SORRY FOR THE MISTAKE

You're lying.

You're a con artist.

IT NOT FOR THE AMERICANS ONLY IT FOR THE WORLD

NO AM NOT AN ARTIST

My Name is Agent WILLIAMS JORDAN This is an empowerment program set up by the federal government to help the communities Your name was picked randomly as one of the winners of the week. The money giving by the federal government. it's not a loan. It's win money giving by the Federal government to help the communities You are being picked randomly as one of the star winners. We will need to confirm some information before we can deliver your winnings to you in your home, the winnings will be delivered in cash to you as soon as the information required are duly filled:

How much do I have to pay?

After you applied and paid €1000 for charges your win money will be at your door step in 8 hours you make the payment i promise you

yes, that's the point at which you steal the money and I get left with nothing.

I PROMISE YOU THAT IF YOU CAN COME UP WITH THIS MONEY THAT YOUR WIN MONEY WILL BE AT YOUR DOOR STEP BELIEVE ME

So why don't you just take the 1k euro charge out of the winnings?

and give me that much less?

We would have love to take out of your your money to pay the fees but from the order the Federal Government In conjunction with the Facebook Freedom Award gave us we must not take any €€€ from your money that you have to pay from your own hand for the fees.

yes, that's because there is NO money in the first place.

I just looked up 'Facebook Freedom Award' on Google, and it's described as a scam

I just looked up 'Facebook Freedom Award' on Google, and it's described as a scam.

I WANT YOU TO NO THAT AM A GOD FEARING MAN AND I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE ME

No the word is 'know'. If you're going to try and scam people, you need better English.

What's the organisation phone number? And address?

JUST TELL ME HOW MUCH YOU ARE HAVING WHIT YOU MAYBE I CAN HELP YOU WHIT THAT

Can you give me the phone number and address of the organisation please

323 835 1436 Washington

I just searched for it. It doesn't exist

What is the address please?

JUST TELL ME IF YOU ARE STILL WITH THE ORGANIZATION?

Which organisation is that then?

Look, I have to get this blog post published and want to include this conversation. Can you hurry up, please?

And why, if it's a US government page, can you not spell Government or Employee correctly?

IF YOU ARE READY TO GET YOUR WIN MONEY OR NOT

Sure. Once you answer my questions.

WHAT QUESTION IS THAT?

what's the address of your organisation?

IF YOU NO YOU ARE NOT READY SO DON'T EVER TEXT ME AGAIN

So you admit that you're lying and stealing money from peopl?

AM JUST BEEN HONEST TO YOU BUT I CAN SEE YOU ARE JUST KIDDING ME

NEVER IN YOUR LIVE CALL ME A THIEF THAT AM STEALING PEOPLES MONEY AGAIN

But that's exactly what you're doing.

At this point he went quiet. Now, if you're outraged by this, and you should be, please feel free to visit the fake page and click on the 3 dots to the right hand side of the profile picture and report it as a scam. At least that way, if enough people complain Facebook might take it down. They haven't yet - why? Because they don't care. It's really that simple. They don't care that their site is being used to scam people out of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros because we - you and me - we're not the users of Facebook, that's the advertisers. We're just the fodder that makes them money, and they treat us accordingly.

EDIT TO ADD:

The thief blocked me at this point, so all of my comments disappeared and I can no longer write to the page. If you're feeling that you'd like to however, please do feel free to warn other people.

 

Facebook live video

Facebook has been improving its live video option. If you've missed out on this, it's a function that allows you to share a video stream live with people on Facebook. It will be recorded and will be available afterwards, and people can connect with you by commenting, and asking questions for example. It's a really nice tool to share what you're doing, show people how to do something or just have a general chat. As Facebook says “Live in Groups allows you to broadcast to just the people in the Facebook Group – so you can go live in your family group, or share a workout plan in a fitness group. Live in Events means you can go live from a birthday party to allow those that can’t make it to join the fun, and a performer can go live backstage to the people who’ve RSVP-ed to the event to give them a sneak peak.”

If you're on your desk/lap top, over on the left hand side menu bar you'll see an option for 'Live video'. You'll then get a new screen popping up which looks like this:

In the top left hand corner the video that you can see is the most popular currently being broadcast. You can click on any of the videos and it will pop into the main part of the screen, and you can then comment, like etc. 

You can zoom in on the global map and by hovering your mouse over a video you can see the live stream, but you'll also get to see where people are watching the video from:

How significant is this? I think it's fairly important, and it's going to fire a shot over the bows of some of the other streaming tools that are available, such as Periscope for example. Facebook has ensured that you can share video with the public, or with specific groups, so there's a fair amount of control over it. More would be good however, and the way in which people can interact is fairly basic. I suspect that we will see this functionality improving a lot in the near future.

 

Snooping on a Facebook account, maybe.

Of course, you won't be doing the snooping, obviously. You're just going to be looking at this tool to see how much information is out there about you, so that you can check your own settings. :) However, if you do want to find out more information about someone, then you just might want to take a look at this tool, which is a Facebook graph search tool. All that you need to do is find the person that you're interested in, and input their name into the tool. That then gives you their Facebook ID and then the snooping, err checking can begin. Much of this you can do with a simple search, such as "Posts commented on by phil bradley" but this gives you a nice quick way of doing it, just with a button press. This is the interface that you'll get to play with:

In case you're wondering, the number in the search box is mine, so you can poke around to your hearts content to see what I'm commenting on and so on. Obviously this is only going to work for public material, not stuff that's private, but that can still be quite useful information. 

Again, it's worth mentioning that you can simply do this by going to Facebook and typing in the appropriate search in the search box - "Photos tagged with Phil Bradley" for instance but as I've said, having it set out like this is a nice quick way of getting access to the information that you're interesting. 

The tool also gives you other search options, such as searching for the most recent postings on a particular subject, location searches which are very good actually. It's easy to run a search to find out if a person in a particular location has visited another location. This isn't quite so easy to find with the normal Facebook search options. You can also find where particular people have visited, and also the bars, bookshops, restaurants, gyms, hotels, and cinemas that they have been to, which is all perfectly above board, and public knowledge, but it's still a bit on the freaky side, if you ask me. 

All told, it's a really interesting little tool and worth exploring - if only to see how much of your own personal information is bleeding out on Facebook.

Google and Facebook fight for your saved content

The two big giants have taken to slugging it out again, this time in the arena of your saved content. As you may already know, if you're looking through Facebook and you see something that interests you, such as a video, post or image for example, you can save it to go back and view again. 

You can then simply click on your Saved option in your left hand menu to see everything that you've saved. Nice and simple and a great way to shove more content under the virtual carpet until you forget you had it in the first place. Facebook is starting to partner with organisations outside of the company now, allowing you to save their material directly into your Facebook account. It's a nice idea, and it further ties you into using Facebook, because you're going to want to keep access to all of those nifty little links, right? It also weakens the hold of any third party tools such as Pocket which we've used in the past. 

Google has just rolled out their own extension Save to Google, which sits in Chrome allowing you to do the same thing. Just pop the icon up into the browser bar, and when you see something that you want to keep, just click. You'll get a nice little pull down menu:

As you can see you can choose a specific image to go with the saved page, and you can add a tag as well. When you need to see what you've previously saved, just click on the link, and up they come. 

Nice and simple. Of course, you've got to remember if you added that useful bit of information to Pocket, Google, Facebook, Pinterest or any of the dozens of other options available to you!

Facebook's secret inbox that you don't know about

Facebook never fails to surprise me. Just when you think you've got a handle on the damn thing, something else comes along and surprises you. Did you know that you've got another inbox, and that it's quite possibly full of messages from people which you haven't replied to? 

If you go to your Messages option on the left hand side of the page and open it you'll see something that looks like this:

Click the 'More' option and you'll see you can look at Unread, Filtered or Archived:

'Filtered' is the option that you want. Click on that and you will see messages from people you don't know, have never had contact with directly and so on. I found about half a dozen from people this year. I've spent the last few minutes going back and forth with messages, all starting with 'I'm sorry that I haven't replied to you before but...' and then blame Facebook. (If in doubt, blame Facebook. If really in doubt, blame Facebook and Google. If totally screwed, blame the Internet.) Try it - let me know if you've found messages that you didn't know you had! While you're at it, check out the Message Requests option as well. You might find even more memos from people there as well. I don't know why Facebook puts some in the Message Requests section and others in the Filtered section, but I doubt that they are going to be telling us any time soon.

New Facebook search option

I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but Facebook has started to roll out a new search function. It's looking at posts that you have recently commented on, and is then suggesting what it regards as appropriate search terms. It looks like this:

I'm really not sure that it's a sensible idea. I find the notification, which sits in the searchbar window to be annoying:

In the example that I've given I have no recollection of commenting on a post about Ikea.... oh hang on.. yes I did. It wasn't anything at all to do with Ikea, it was about a friend who posted that he wasn't well enough to go there, so I made some comment about man flu and shopping. The fact that it was related to Ikea was entirely beside the point. If Facebook is keen on getting me to use search more often, they might want to try increasing search functionality, rather than faffing around with novelty ideas.