I spend a decent amount of time on Facebook. I follow a great variety of companies and news outlets, not to mention managing business pages, so that Facebook serves as a platform to educate others and myself. It’s also fun to see pictures of cats and “selfies”. These extensions are a few that I’ve found to enhance my Facebook experience. I browse on Google Chrome, so these will be specific to that web browser, which I highly recommend. You might opt to give them a whirl.
Facebook for Chrome is an extension that adds a little Facebook icon to your toolbar. Clicking it will open the interface, streamlined to give you options to view your newsfeed, profile, photos, notifications, and inbox. You can also click the “Post Update” option to do just that. It does have an ad along the bottom (it is free, after all) which some might not like. I find that for personal use, it’s a neat alternative to using the Facebook website. One thing that irked me was that I couldn’t like comments, which is something I do often. Trying to manage a business page? This is not what you want to be using; there is no way that I found to access my business pages. It’s fun for the casual user, but I require more control over my Facebook.
More control is exactly what Social Fixer brings to the table. Once installed, visit your Facebook page and you’ll be presented with a setup “wizard” that walks you through various options. Adding tabs to your newsfeed, fixing the chat interface, disabling the lightbox viewer, and various other tweaks are available to you. Choosing the default options is fine as you can further tweak the experience once installed. Social Fixer adds a few icons to the top of every post on your newsfeed that lets you save posts for later and marking posts as read to hide them from view. For the brave, go digging into the Social Fixer options; you can access them by clicking on the wrench icon in the Facebook header. This is a very powerful extension, but like any extension, it can be deactivated or removed if it screws up (or you screw up). I should mention that this extension is available for nearly every browser, so there’s no reason for you not to try it out.
Ever find it spooky how the webpages you’ve been browsing are the ads you see in Facebook? Facebook Disconnect, from the same folks that bring you Disconnect. This beauty blocks Facebook from tracking the websites you visit. Facebook is free to use, and to pay for their efforts they get to harvest a whole lot of data about you and millions of other people and they way all of you browse the Internet. Some of you might like seeing ads that are crafted just for you and you might not like this extension, but it’s easy to undo.
If you use Facebook, these extensions deserve a look. These can serve to enhance your Facebook experience so that your time is best served. It’s important to streamline your experience so those cat pictures and “selfies” get the attention they deserve. While you’re on Facebook, be sure and stop by our page (https://www.facebook.com/BayouTechnologies) and give us a like! You’ll get a few posts a day about the technology that interests me. You can also reach out and shoot me suggestions for the column.
