Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with your friends and family. But like anything popular, it can be misused and attacked. If you are like most Facebook users, you wish there was a way to dislike something on Facebook. You can like something, so why can’t you dislike something?

Now there is a new scam that takes advantage of this. So if you see anything about a dislike feature on Facebook, ignore it. It’s a scam! 

In other news, Facebook now lets you share you whereabouts with your friends by letting you “Check in” to a location through Facebook Places. If you’re Like me, you may think, “I would never use that feature so I don’t need to worry about it.” But hold on there. Did you know that your friends can “Check you in” to places? It’s true. If one of your friends checked into a place, they could specify who else is there and they could list you. That is, unless you change some settings on Facebook.

So here is how to prevent others from sharing your location on Facebook.
First, login to your Facebook account and click on Account and then privacy settings. Now click on “Customize Settings”

In the first section which is called “Things I Share”, the last items are “Places I check in” and “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in”. For “Places I check in”, change it to “Only Me”. For the other option, click to remove the checkmark from the box next to Enable.

Now, lastly, go down to the section called “Things others share” and disable “Friends can check me in to Places”.

That’s it!

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You may have seen Facebook in the news a lot recently. There was the announcement that Facebook hit 500 million users. That’s cool, but having that many users makes Facebook a target for scammers.

There have also been a lot of announcements lately about scams and security risks on Facebook. The most recent one is an app that will let you see who viewed your profile so that you can see who’s stalking you. At some point in the process of getting this app, they will ask you to agree to a $19.99 monthly charge to your cell phone bill.

This is why it is so important not to just blindly click next or OK on every window. You could agree to something like this. And trying to get this type of monthly charge removed from your bill can be difficult. I know from personal experience. A couple of years ago a $20 per month charge started showing up on our cell phone bill. We tracked it down to my daughters cell phone, but didn’t know what it was for. We called the cell phone provider. The surprising thing is that they could not tell us what it was for or even the name of the company that was making the charge. I thought that was ridiculous.

After a lot of investigation, we discovered that our daughter had  accidentally signed up for a weekly horoscope that would be delivered to her cell phone via text message. She didn’t realize there would be a $4.99 fee each week for this which added up to around $20 a month.

By the way, the Facebook scam I talked about earlier has already conned 150,000 facebook users out of $19.99 a month. That’s a lot of money.

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There are a lot of fun applications on Facebook. Popular games like Mafia Wars, Farmville, and many more. Many of these applications are fun to play and use. But many of us don’t use these applications. Some of have friends who use them so much it clutters up our Facebook page making it hard to see the information we want to see. But never fear, there is something you can do about it.

When you see a message on your facebook page from an application, if it’s an application you don’t use and you don’t want to see messages from it, here’s what you can do to block messages from that application from appearing on your facebook page.

Take a look at this example.

The above message appeared on my facebook page. The application is called “Friendly Hearts”. If I want to block messages from Friendly Hearts from showing up on my facebook pages, I would first click on the picture in the Friendly Hearts message. When I do that, I get a screen that looks like this.

Don’t click on Allow. What you want to do is click on the name of the application which appears in blue. In this case, I click on “Friendly Hearts” which is show in blue text.

After you click on the name of the application, it will take you to that application’s home page. Here is a portion of the Friendly Hearts home page.

In the left column under the “Go to Application” button, you will see several options in blue. The last option is “Block Application”. Click on “Block Application”. It will ask you if you are sure and you should confirm.

And your done. You’ll need to do this for each application you want to block messages from.

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Recently, Facebook made big changes to its website. For the most part, the changes are pretty good. Things mainly got moved around and reorganized. I like the way they have organized it, but there was one change that I don’t like and frankly, it baffles me.

With the new change, when you are on your Facebook home page, you may not be seeing all of the status updates from your friends. I noticed this when I saw status updates from my friends on my phone, but did not see them on my Facebook home page. That’s when I saw it. You can select to show top news or most recent news. The default is top news.

I don’t fully understand how they decide what is top news and what is not. But I don’t like it. Maybe I’m a control freak, but I want to decide which status updates I want to read. I don’t want Facebook to decide for me. When I switch my Facebook home page to “Most Recent” I see all of the latest status updates from my friends with the most recent on top. That’s the way I like it.

So if you are like me and want to see all of your friends status updates, you might want to switch yours to “Most Recent”. It’s easy to do. Just go to your Facebook home page. In the middle column it will say news feed and below will be all of your friend’s status updates. Look at the top right of that middle column and you will see where it says “Top News” and “Most Recent”. Whichever one is in black is the current one. Switch between the two back and forth and see how when you select top news, a lot of status updates are not displayed. Switch back to “Most Recent” and your missing status updates return.

I have noticed that sometimes it switches back to “Top News”. So keep an eye on it and make sure you are always on “Most Recent”. I haven’t found a way to tell Facebook to always use “Most Recent” by default. 

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