Save Time With Facebook

"Save time with Facebook", is that not an oxymoron? Facebook is a time sink, you don't save any time when you log into it. A more apt title would be "Waste less time with Facebook" but there is no joy in uttering that.

One thing that Facebook users do is to join groups. There is probably a group for everything imaginable. I had my own share of going wild with Facebook groups. Before I knew it, I belong to a few too many.

Navigating FB can be an inefficient use of time. Even with the Groups app already bookmarked within the FB environment, i.e. sitting on the Applications bar in the lower left corner, getting to a group you belong to can take too many clicks. You use one click to open thee Groups application. Instead of seeing only the groups you belong to, the screen is divided into two columns, the left column showing groups your friends joined or had activities in then some groups you belong to on the right. FB sorts groups by level of activities instead of alphabetical, so unless the group you want to get to has some recent activities it will take more than one click to get to it. You may end up needing to click See All to list all your groups. Again, the list is sorted by recent updates, so knowing the name of your group will not help you too much. You may need to go to page two, or to order the list by names - more mouse clicks.

The best way to get to groups quickly, AFAIK, is to bookmark them with your browser. Not just any plain bookmark, but bookmarks on the bookmark bar. As shown in the screenshot, I have many groups related to Newtown High School in Elmhurst neatly group into the Newtown folder on the bookmark bar. I have to invest a little time organizing the list, but now I can quickly jump to a class year with just two clicks - one to pull down the list then the second one to select the year. I am not even a member of most of those groups, so this is something you cannot even do with the Groups application. As exotic as FB may appear, what with the many apps and notifications, in the end you still use FB mostly via a web browser. Web browsers and bookmarks go hand in hand way back and bookmarks are still very useful today.