noob2geek » Social Networking

Export Birthdays from Facebook

Aditya — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 06:16:46 +0000

One of the great features of Facebook is the birthday reminders. Let’s face it – there are many of us who aren’t very good at remembering birthdays. This habit of forgetting can be dangerous (especially if you have a girlfriend/wife). To avoid any injuries, mental stress and a lot of mess – Facebook has given us this extremely important feature of birthday reminders.

However, there is a problem that many people don’t want to reveal their birthday (me for example) mainly because of identity theft issues. This makes things a little difficult since you don’t get all the notifications at the same place now. A solution? Use google calendar or iCal or any other application where you can add birthdays and get reminders (you have to know the date of course).

I began using Google Calendar to keep track of birthdays even before Facebook. At that time I used to manually enter every birthday. This makes things a bit time consuming, especially if you have multiple hundred friends. The solution? Use the export feature in Facebook. Here’s how,

Click on the events tab on the left panel.

Events List

Now on the center pane you would get a list of all the birthdays. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see an Export Birthdays link. It would open a dialog that looks like this,

Export Birthdays

Copy this link, now open Google calendar and click on the Add by URL,

Add By URL

This will add a new calendar to your Google calendar. You’re done except for one part. You need to set the reminders for the calendar. To do that go to settings ? calendar settings ? calendars ? Friend’s Birthdays. Click on notifications and set the type of notifications.

: Notifications

You’re done. You can do this for any other application that supports iCal format calendars also. Now there’s an application which might just save you from a breakup

Synchronize Google Buzz with Twitter

Aditya — Fri, 21 May 2010 07:51:18 +0000

Google Buzz took everyone by a storm. A small one at that, but people who frequently use GMail now had the ability to track their friends and follow their activity from within GMail. Google not only allowed feeds from its own services like Picasa, we can also get the updates from some approved services like Twitter and as it turns out you can also add your own WordPress feeds to Buzz if you want. Google had done it again – well almost.

One thing Buzz was seriously lacking – is still lacking is the ability to export Buzz updates to other sites like twitter. This has been one of the most annoying thing for me. If Twitter can export to Buzz then why can’t I do the opposite thing as well? But I can, there are now applications that let you post your Buzz updates to Twitter. Here’s how you can do that ?

Visit your own Google profile here.
Almost all browsers support feeds now, in the address bar on the right hand side, there’s an icon of RSS feed, click on that.
Alternatively, you can find the same feed at the URL, http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/{user.id}/public/posted
This feed only posts all the entries marked public and skips the private entries.
Now head over to a service that allows posting to Twitter from RSS feeds.
I have briefly summarized 2 services below.

Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is one of the best feed posting services available. You can chose from an abundance of options like whether you want to post just the title of the feed, or a bit of text to go with it, which URL shortening service you want to use, whether you want a prefix to each tweet (like noob2geek:).

This service also provides some of statistical data to let you figure out which ones of your posts is generating how many clicks from twitter and details of such things. You can sign up with a free account for Twitterfeed here.

Buzz can tweet

Buzz can tweet, as the name suggests, is primarily a service for posting your buzz feeds to Twitter. It summarizes your Buzz posts in URLs and posts them to twitter making it possible for your followers to get the full enjoyment.

It will share everything from Google services (Maps, Picasa, etc) and will filter the Twitter posts sent to Buzz. Which is the whole point in synchronization after-all. Similar to Twitterfeed like we have the features to chose our choice of shortening services. One added feature is you can optionally only post the Buzz posts tagged as #twitter to Twitter and exclude the rest. If the posts are smaller than 140 characters, there are no links made back to Buzz.

Both these services have problems associated with Buzz. They cannot, in real time, update twitter just like Buzz cannot sync from Twitter in real time. Apart from this glitch, everything else is good to go.

Scan your Facebook privacy settings with ReclaimPrivacy

Santhosh — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:16:37 +0000

You might have read about the recent news regarding Facebook privacy issues and Mark Zuckerburg, the founder literally stealing user information and photos. Although Facebook claims that it’s privacy settings have been beefed-up, one cannot trust it unless you get to see what’s actually happening in practical. Though Facebook offers you an option to take control over your privacy settings, it doesn’t suggest you to use important settings which might turn vulnerable to your account when neglected. And so to battle this issue, a third-party developer has come up with a solution to scan your account’s privacy settings and lets you to make necessary changes.

Say hello to ReclaimPrivacy.org. This website provides an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings.

Visit the site, and drag the “Scan for Privacy” bookmark link to your bookmark bar. Login to your Facebook account and click on the bookmarklet and it starts scanning your facebook settings and suggests you what changes you are ought to do in Privacy Settings.

Make all the necessary changes and scan recursively until everything looks fine and stay away from threats.