Saturday, January 3, 2009
If you have a few active friends on Facebook and you have email notifications turned on, you are probably familiar with the phrase “Facebook is f***ing spamming me” .
Long story short, I try to practice Inbox Zero and having Facebook send me emails on every comment, tag added, tag removed, friend added, friend removed and every other permutation and combination possible..phewww…is simply not acceptable.
(To prove my case, at one point I received 28 emails in 23 minutes Update: 44 emails in 31 minutes from Facebook, that’s more than an email per minute! - See below!)
So I set upon the task of finding a less invasive & distractive way of receiving these notifications. Now I could have created a smart folder and have everything from Facebook go in there automatically but that would still not solve the purpose. I would still be looking at these emails at some point to know what’s going on. Enter RSS feeds. Here’s what I ended up doing:
Step-1: Subscribe to RSS feeds for your notifications
- Login to Facebook
- Click on Inbox on the menu bar
- Click on Notifications Tab
- Click on the “Your Notifications” link under ‘Subscribe to Notifications’ on the right side bar
- Select your favorite feed reader application and you are set to receive updates every time you have a new notification.
Step-2: Turn off email notifications
- Login to Facebook
- Click on Settings on the menu bar
- Click on Notifications Tab
- Turn off the notifications per your choice.
- Click on Save Settings
And you are now set for a distraction free Facebook experience.
WARNING: Please note that this setup will NOT provide you with on the minute alerts. It’s set to update every half hour or so. So if you are one of those Facebook addicts who can’t survive that long, this is probably not the best option for you. It works fine for me, because it’s less distractive and I can check the feeds when I want to, not when I am asked to. They are not intrusive and do not get in the middle of me doing other tasks. It’s a winner for me!
After a few dozen invitations and daily dozes of “come on already” by the beloved early adopters, I have finally boarded the Facebook wagon. As much as I would like to debate that I have been pushed in to it by forces beyond my control, the experience actually hasn’t been too bad. Took me a little while to understand it’s intricacies, but I think I am now up to speed with it. It’s been fun really.
I had read some time back that Facebook is fast turning out primarily to be a photo sharing website rather than just another social site. And if you look at the thousands and thousands of pictures being uploaded and shared everyday, it’s not hard to believe.
Now as much as the internet community would like us to think that keeping photos online is the way to go and that it has replaced the local storage of your precious photos, I am still one of those who likes to keep a copy of a few good ones in iPhoto as well (the satisfaction of having local copies of your photos has been proven to give you a better sleep, even better than the sleep number mattresses). Hence the argument, that if I would be using Facebook to view shared pictures, I must find an easy way to be able to download them as well.
So when my cousin Kareena sent me the New Year pics on FaceBook, the quest to find an easy way to download them became stronger and eager and it led me to the discovery or rediscovery of this really slick piece of software called the PhotoBook (Mac Only) which does something really cool. It lets you browse all your friends’ albums and with one-click lets you import them into iPhoto on your Mac. And the best part - it’s free! I am pretty sure that there is a PC equivalent available, but am not motivated enough currently to go dig for it. Maybe sometime later this year 
On that note, here’s wishing everybody a very Happy New Year 2009!
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Bit.ly seems to be the the favored URL shortening service these days on the blogging and micro blogging arena (aka twitter). Here’s what makes Bit.ly stand out -
Ever since I switched to Mac last year, I have been going back and forth among the browsers - Safari, Firefox, Camino. I even tried Fluid which actually turned out to be something very different.
Anyways long story short, I had settled down to using Safari in the last few months. It worked for the most part except for a few dumb websites like airtelcallhome.com for which I used Firefox (more on these bozos in my next post) and that it would stop responding if I have one too many tabs open. It could just not take the load of the gazillion open tabs and I would find myself recovering the open tabs from the history quite often. It would get slower and slower with every new tab and get on my nerves big time..aghhh it was really frustrating and annoying.
But I still loved and used Safari for more or less the eye candy (call it the iAppeal)
Cut to last weekend. Kunal introduced reintroduced me to my old love (from the dark windows era) Firefox. They recently released v3.0…Gotta say, I love Firefox 3. Why? I will keep it simple -
- It looks really good - the iAppeal that is. It now has the Mac look to it.
- It does not seem to crash unlike Safari (I currently have 17 tabs open and it’s responding to each one of them) no delay = no frustration = love firefox)
Moral of the story - Try Firefox 3.0. It’s really awesome!
Get it here -
I wish I had found this earlier. Can’t even count how many “living in the moment” purchases I have made!
Found this Flickr set on TUAW. Simply couldn’t resist posting it here. The iPhone being unboxed by tiny little men. Amazing. Refreshing. Creativity at it’s super duper best!
PS: I reserve the creative rights to assume these men may be from Mars and not belong to a toy village called Lego!
TUAW reported on Friday that the iPhone may be on it’s way to India this september. Gotta love the picture that they put up on their blog. The Mahatma himself endorsing Apple. I bet he would have loved to make the Macbook Air a part of his dandi march gear :-)… yeah yeah and iPhone too!
All right so this morning I set my IM status to “Just found Nirvana today” and it caused a stir. I am not kidding, it really did. There’s something about people. They are really nice, mostly at least. They seem to notice all the weird things you do, but they don’t say a thing. They give you a benefit of doubt. They keep doing that over and over until that one day where you over stretch your luck and do something really uncanny. And then they question. What? Why? Where? How?
That is what I think happened to me today. I keep doing weird things but today I got all the permutations right. All the stars in the sky were just perfectly aligned and I hit the nail on it’s head with that IM status.
(Continued)
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