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!
Tagged: facebook, geek_talk, web_service