Today we continue with Tricks for Facebook Pages. This post should be of great interest to current administrators of pages, webmasters or whoever wants to become one. Everyday on Facebook thousands of pages are created, some are growing rapidly, some have only a few members, but others have only created confusion.

Have you ever found two pages with the same name? It is rare. From February 1, for example, Facebook has stopped pages for applications and now requires the owners of these applications to create pages and migrate all the fans. As a result Page duplicates were created with the same subject.

Another case is that causing issues are the function places. When you check in to a new place on Facebook, you create a special page for that site unless the page for that location, commercial city, and brand already existed. This check-in then creates a duplicate page and ultimately creates confusion.

Few know that on Facebook you can merge two pages that have the same name. This merger also migrates the likes over to the selected page. Follow these instructions.

1. Go to Page (business or place) with the most "Likes" or one that you will keep.
2. Click on the Edit Page in the top right of the page.
3. From the left sidebar, select Resources.
4. Click on the link Merge duplicate pages . If you do not see the link it means that you are not administrator of two pages that have a similar name. The link is only available if you administer both pages with similar names.
5. A dialog box will display the pages and sites managed by you, which can be joined. Then select the pages you want to merge. (If you're joining a site and this page must have the same address address)

Once you start the migration process, as contained in the window, status updates, photos, videos and notes on the page will be deleted. The Page with less Likes will be permanently deleted, but Likes will be migrated on to the page that you have chosen to keep.

Finally, we need to point out that the process is not immediate, depending on the number of Likes migrating may take a few hours. (One of our tests with the migration of 2000 users, took several hours but everything went smoothly).

In a previous article we pointed out there was a way to disable the timeline with Chrome, Firefox and Safari, so it was only a matter of time that more extensions would apear that facilitate the process.

This method allows you to be able to see your profile and that of others as it was before the change, in a short, it allows you to disable, remove the new graphics and restore the old profile. But that does not mean that your friends will not see your timeline. There is in fact no possible way to disable the timeline for all users and go back to the original. Everything we do here is to interact with Facebook as if you're using Internet Explorer 7, a browser is not supported by the timeline and thus shows the old profile.
 

How to disable the timeline

The extension, designed by Andrea Marsico, called TimeLineRemove and is currently only available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. (The site is reporting that they will soon release for Safari and Internet Explorer)

The procedure is simple, all you have to do is install it ( link to Chrome - link to Firefox ) and visit Facebook. You should already be able to see the profiles (including yours) as before.

The extension, in the case of Google Chrome, offers a place to go on the toolbar (the button with t, see image). Clicking on it you can control when and whether or not to activate it, simply click on "Status: Timeline Remove" to activate it or not. Here in this case is the profile of Mark Zuckerberg with the extension enabled.

Download the extension for your browser!

From the launch page and activation of the timeline ( link ) little to nothing is said on the subject of privacy, only a few words: " Control who can view your content : Only people with whom you shared a post in your home can see it in your timeline. You can go back and change who can view a post, delete or hide it from the timeline. "It's not explained how to check who is viewing what, how to limit the display of post to only friends, and how to avoid that anybody can see and find out everything we interact with or we do on Facebook.

So in this post we believe it's important to explain how to protect your privacy with the timeline, and understand the basic settings required and how to set them to keep you safe.

The timeline will in fact be a mandatory change for all users and there will be no turning back and we'll all need to get used to the new profile, but it is very important to look at your privacy settings.

Privacy with the timeline

Once activated the timeline gives your 7 days to configure it, then it will be published automatically.

The first consequence of the timeline publishing is that it gives access to all of your friends that you have added on Facebook from the day you signed up. That's right ... your profile is in fact turned into an open book easy to browse, everyone will have access to everything from your first status update till today.

And many of these posts will be public, that is open to everyone, even those who are not your friend! So the first change you need to know is how to set the visibility for your old post. To restrict the public for your old post you just go to privacy settings ( link ), click "Manage Past Post Visibility" popup and click "Limit Old Posts."

Then click on Done when you are asked if you are unsure of proceeding. Now only your friends can see your old content published from when you first signed up on Facebook not the greater public.

Then it is important to choose the privacy level of your content that you post on your profile. This level of privacy is the default, or what will be used by default to all posts on Facebook, for every story and you can then decide whether to change the settings or leave everything as is.

Always choose your default settings to a secure level of privacy, we recommend that you set to Friends or click Custom and set as friends or include friend lists, in other words, who can see what.

Last control option is to know how to select privacy settings for each post, or to choose whether to hide or delete from your timeline profile. To do this, go on your timeline and find content already published and click on the two controls, a pencil and a star. The star is used to resize the news in your timeline, or to make it important and highly visible, and the pencil gives you access to post settings: you can choose to hide the update from the timeline, delete the post, add or change the date and place of publication (the position).

These checks are very important in order to protect your privacy and avoid all the information we post on Facebook being accessible to everyone on Facebook.

Share this article with your friends, and help them to protect your privacy!

Share on Facebook

After reporting two ways to customize your new timeline (see How to personalize the cover of the timeline ) today we announce a new applications that lists dozens of covers for our timeline.

The cover of the timeline is essential to give that touch of originality to our profile, it's the first thing you notice when someone visits us on Facebook, so it is a good idea to customize.

Facebook Timeline Covers collects the best covers, divided into categories, some customizable and ready for use on your profile. Clicking on Preview of any cover, you will see it enlarged as if it were in your journal, and clicking on Choose a few clicks you can put the cover on your timeline, through the application.

Some covers are also customizable, allowing you to add text to the images.

Small trick: if you do not want to use the application you can also click Preview, and then with the right mouse button click on the cover and save the enlarged image (only works with Internet Explorer), then that image you can go upload to your timeline.

Another application is Cover Photo Magic plus you can choose a cover that also allows you to customize it by entering your photo album on Facebook. You can choose between the covers and then select "Next" and choose which of your photos to include.

More and more people come and ask us for help like: Why don't I see my updates at all? How do I remove everything from the box at the top right? How do I not show everything I do to my friends?

Let's start by saying that the box at the top right of Facebook, the mini bulletin board that runs automatically and shows updates of friends, and more generally of the pages to which users have subscribed to the updates, you call the box, the ticker.

Also please note that this box is not visible to everyone, from the Facebook help center:

"The box updates is only visible to people with a certain level of account activity. If you do not see the box for updates, it's probably because you do not use Facebook much, so there is not enough because the content pane of updates may be useful. "

We have already reported on Tricksfacebook how to remove the ticker, but obviously the removal doesn't mean that your friends will not see your information in their ticker. In fact, the ticker only displays material that is already visible on your Facebook, it only shows updates in real time.

What updates are shown in the box to my friends?

When you publish content, which is a status update, a photo, a link and so on, you can choose the level of privacy: if this is public then people who receive your updates (either friends and subscribers) can see it, but if you set the visibility of the content to "just friends" then just the people who are your friends can see it. If the content is public, then when you click "I like" your friends will see it in the ticker of the updates that I like was clicked. If the content is only visible to friends then only friends will see action in common.

Can I hide my news from the ticker of updates?

Yes you can hide some recent activity, such as information about a friend's activities, games and other applications. All the control is from your profile (timeline).

Whether or not you have a new timeline, when you share on Facebook, for example, when you click "I like" on a page, go to your profile and click on X to the right of the news, you can hide it from your profile and you can also hide all future News of that type. Once removed from the box it will also be hide future updates.

If you want to hide that kind of news from your ticker follow these instructions:

1. Click on a news story in pane updates
2. Click on the menu at the top right
3. Select "Hide the news"

These and more information about how the ticker updates are available in the Facebook help center by clicking here.

For several weeks we have started to point out the best tricks for the timeline and we've also provided the best sites and applications to customize the cover image in previous articles:
How to customize the cover of your timeline
Two applications to customize the cover of your timeline

Today we add to list with two new websites that collect hundreds of covers and have them ready for you to use on your profile.

1. Cover Photo Finder

CoverPhotoFinder collects hundreds of covers and has them ready to be inserted into your timeline. In the upper right corner you can click on "Log in with Facebook" and authorize the site to use your account, then after you click "Use This Photo Cover" on the cover you choose it will put it on your profile.

Each user also has the ability to upload their own cover and add to the collection site by clicking on the arrow at the top right labeled Upload.

2. My profile cover

Another service is MyProfileCover which has several positive points compared to the competitor. The covers are classified into categories for easy reference, so you can browse among animals, cars, cartoons, nature, people, games etc..

To put the cover on your profile you must click download (see image at top of this article) "Click to download this cover." You can then load it manually in your timeline.

A negative aspect of the site is the watermark that is inserted to the right of every cover. This negative point is offset, however, with another unique service, the opportunity to apply for your cover. Each user can also add a comment to this page and ask for a customized timeline cover image.

What is the optimal size for profile pictures on Facebook? If the loaded image is too large the system will automatically shrink the image to maintain the standard proportions and in most cases the image is small and blurry, if the image loaded is too small it becomes scarcely visible.

Facebook does not indicate which both the right size for the images in profile, requires only that these do not exceed the 4MB of weight, so that they can be thumbnails. But they do not tell us anything further about the best format to use to make it clear that they are.

The site that we announce today allows you to create your profile picture long, with the maximum possible size of Facebook that is 180x450 pixels. This image is useful for pages ( in our example ) because it lets you enter text, logos or other items you want to share. It's also useful for those who have not yet updated the profile to the timeline.

Here's how to use the site and crop your photos with the size and format best for Facebook:

1. Coupled with this site: http://profilepicturemaker.com/long-height-facebook-profile-picture-maker.jsp
2. Click on "Load Photo" to select the image to be uploaded from your disk or click on "use webcam" to take a picture with your webcam.
3. Use the bar left and right to zoom and adjust the alignment.
4. From the controls at the bottom you can also add effects and adjust color, saturation, brightness, contrast and hue.
5. When finished you can download the photos by clicking on "Download pic" (do not rename the image is saved as "xxDont-rename-this.png") or by logging in to Facebook, you can send it directly to your page by clicking on "Login to FB "and" send to FB."

The image is saved with optimal size and format that is 180 px wide, 450 px in length and as a Portable Network Graphics (PNG).

With more than 800 million users and 900 million objects with which they interact (including pages, groups, communities and events), with millions and millions of daily posts that are published and shared with Facebook, means it has long been the biggest and most popular worldwide database of information and public opinion.

For these reasons, the search engine on Facebook is an excellent resource for finding users or pages but it's primary use is to find public status updates, links, notes, photos etc..

For some time now websites like OpenBook allows you to search public posts to find what Facebook users think of a particular topic. We can then look what they think of a product, service, company, and so on.

Today we want to tell you about a project similar to this. Facebook search lets you search on Facebook without being registered with the site. It's not necessary that you be a registered user on Facebook to access its database of public information, now you just visit: http://facebooksearch.com and search between public updates of people and pages.

Some examples? Here's what users are thinking at this moment about the Superbowl or what they saying publicly.

Here at TricksFacebook we often share programs and extensions that at most customize Facebook, some are only compatible with certain browsers and some are compatible with all other browsers, but are too invasive, or users hate the customization options.

From several years of research that we carry out this blog, after trying every trick created for the popular social networking loved and hated by all, we now want to show you the best programs to customize your Facebook, and we made sure that they're free and compatible with the best browser.

In reality, what we're about to suggest is not new, they've already been discussed in several of our articles articles, but they have been renewed, some have changed names and the some software has become everyone's favorite to maximum personalization of our Facebook experience.

We are talking about Social Fixer (also known as first and as Better Facebook Minimalist extension for Chrome), and a free extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and also as a script for Greasemonkey that removes some "trouble" from Facebook and part of exciting new features, enhancing the practice site.

Features and functions of Social Fixer

• Tabs (Tab) in your news stream. The updates you receive from your friends, pages, applications and games will be grouped in tabs to be easily organized. The posts of your friends, those to whom you are most interested in, will be the homepage, all the others (which you can read later) will be the other tabs.

 

 

• Themes. You can install different themes, skins, and custom layouts. You can change wallpaper, color styles and images used. And for the more experienced, you can also add CSS and customize it how you want!

 

 

• Hide what you have already read. Re-read things several times? If you've already read an update of a friend you can hide it without necessarily having to hide all future updates of that friend.

 

• Larger images on mouse over. Just pass your cursor over any image to enlarge, without having to click on the photo or link.

 

 

• Highlight the new user. Just check the post to see what comments you have not read, it will be highlighted and will save you valuable time.

 

 

• And much more ... How about notifications when you're removed as a friend from your friends, filtering to customize your news feed, automatic removal of recent activity from your profile, and more.

 
These are just some of the functions of Social Fixer, for a complete overview, visit this link.

You can download from the Social Fixer official website. Here are direct links to the extensions for each browser:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari
Opera
Greasemonkey

On this blog we are the first to report several applications to add items to your Facebook profile, some of these are become your favorite applications and other pass into oblivion.

In fact some of the services offered by thousands of applications on Facebook can be of interest to you, many other apps are often tried once or twice and then forgotten... and the same happens with games.

The problem is that every time you authorize an application, we give the permission to access our personal information, often photos and videos, the possibility of publishing the timeline, see our list of friends, etc.. Our Italian Blogger is a true advocate of privacy and he already informed us all over 2 years ago on his blog. But here today, He and I (American author) renew our invitation to you to remove unused applications.

Follow this link to Facebook to remove them: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications

I also want to refer you a site that collects links to the pages of the most popular social network applications and services on the web: http://mypermissions.org/

By visiting it you will have the ability to remove unused applications related to your account on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram and Flickr.

As the slogan of MyPermissions states: "Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions."