February 24th – By: Craig Pen

Imagine life without the internet or the telephone. Imagine walking to the next town to deliver a message. Compared to days past, today’s far reaching and nearly instantaneous social networking technology is magic. With the new third party Facebook Chat Messenger integration, the new Facebook photo uploader and the new Facebook privacy settings, the magic keeps getting better.

Right: Chit Chat for Facebook makes it possible to use Facebook Chat from your desktop like you would another instant messenger network like Windows Live Messenger or Google Talk. The Facebook Instant Messenger supports conversation history, emoticons and sign in status alerts.

New Facebook Chat Messenger Integration

The Facebook Chat Messenger interface has been modified to stand out. It displays how many of your friends are online and lists some of their names. The text is small. The options are few. Facebook Chat Messenger requires an open browser window making it inconvenient when multitasking.

A stand alone application like Chit Chat for Facebook allows you to connect to the Facebook instant message network without dealing with the awkward facebook chat box within your browser. Chit Chat for Facebook can load and sign in automatically when Windows starts. It can log chats and alert you when friends sign in or out of Facebook. It even remembers its window size and hides away with a single click, simplifying multitasking. Chit Chat for Facebook will even let you leave a message on a friend’s wall. It is instantaneous message delivery, with no need to walk all the way to the next town.

Uploading photos to Facebook has never been easier or more convenient. The new uploading tool is easy to download and install. It may even look and feel familiar. It allows you to search your computer for the photos you want to share. You can select them by clicking on their thumbnail image and upload them to your profile. More file formats will be accepted to solve much complained about compatibility issues. The new uploader even allows the photo upload process to continue after you have left the Facebook website. This makes uploading last night’s party photos far less of a chore.

New Facebook Privacy Settings

Back before the internet and the telephone, life must have been very private. New technologies like Google Streetview and Facebook threaten traditional notions of privacy. Facebook used to allow any of the friends in your network indiscriminate access to everything in your profile. Facebook’s new privacy features are set up to be the best to date. To protect your privacy, Facebook now allows you to customize exactly who sees what. The new Facebook magic will ensure your boss, your spouse, and your parents see only what you want them to. You can specify who can have access to each individual piece of content. You can allow access to friends only, to friends and friends of friends only, to everyone, or to custom lists of friends. This will return a little more confidentiality to our modern privacy compromised, technological world.

Today it is nearly impossible to imagine life without the internet or the telephone. Tomorrow it may be impossible to imagine a Facebook without apps like Chit Chat, the new Facebook photo uploader, and the new Facebook privacy settings. Modern social networking breakthroughs are magic and the magic keeps getting better.


About the Author: Craig Pen is a freelance writer writing for a living in Niagara Falls, Ontario. When not out hiking and biking, he can usually be found camped out in front of his 106 inch projector screen writing away.

By: Garin Kilpatrick

Generally speaking I am not a fan of Toolbars, many are junk and useless.

But for a few important reasons I really like the Facebook toolbar for Firefox.

I like this Toolbar is because it is east to use and very customizable.  At first I disliked all of the notifications that it was giving me about every little thing happening in Facebook, but I soon discovered that by scrolling to the bottom of the “quick links” list and clicking on “toolbar settings” that I was able to customize exactly which notifications I recieve, if any!

With a few quick clicks the Firefox toolbar transformed from annoying, to very useful!

Another cool feature of the Firefox Facebook toolbar is the friends sidebar.  The friends sidebar allows you to sort your friends by name, or in three other ways:

Besides that the toolbar gives you quick links to the most common aspects of your Facebook, a “share” button that makes it easy to share any page from the web on facebook, and a “Search Facebook” field as well.

If you grant permission to the toolbar you can also update your status updates from a field on the right hand side.  Overall the toolbar is very useful, and for any avid facebooker I highly recommend you download it.

Not enough screen space because of the Toolbar? Try this tip: Simply press the F11  key and the top browser bars will dissappear until you press it again!

Don’t have Firefox? Get the latest version of Firefox for Free