WORD BLITZ - PLAY WITH NON-FRIENDS

My current favorite word game is Word Blitz by Lotum, usually played through Facebook's relatively new game engine.  It's basically a Boggle clone, i.e. you have a grid of letters to work with, connect the letters to form words in the allocated two minutes, in a race against an opponent.  Like most word games, the words you form don't necessarily have useful daily usage, but rather it depends on the letters' assigned points, not unlike Scrabble.

One strange thing with the Facebook version is that you don't get to randomly play against opponents, not easily anyway.  You either drag many of your friends into the fray or earn some Hearts, whether through a timing system or by watching video ads, so that you can play in a tournament.  I suppose that's how they primarily make money, eyeballs supposedly exposed to advertisements.  While the game is popular, many people have a hard time convincing friends to play the game.  Waiting around to have enough Hearts to be able to enter a tournament is a pain.  A popular request in some Facebook groups for players of Word Blitz is that they need friends to play with.  There is no obvious way to play with people who are not already a friend in the Facebook world.  But it is true that you don't need to be a friend of someone to be able to challenge them to a game.

The trick is you first need to make a connection with a player via Facebook Messenger, which is the messaging system in the Facebook ecosystem.  Anyone can send a private message to anyone via Messenger, unless one party doesn't like the other and already blocked them.  When you see someone say, "I need someone to play me!", go to their profile and send them a message, something like "Let us play Word Blitz!"

Next launch Word Blitz and scroll down the Leaderboard, all the way down to the bottom of the list to find the Invite entry.  In the screenshot below, I scrawled over people I am friend with to give them some privacy.  Click on the plus sign next to Invite.

Scroll a bit down to find the list of people who you recently exchanged messages in Messenger.  It can be a friend or in this case, the non-friend that you just verbally challenged to a game.  That challenge of course was nothing more than to establish a link, so that that person would show up in the list after you clicked the plus sign in the screen before.  Click Play.

That's it!  That's how you can play people who are not friends with you on Facebook.  Personally, I do this from time to time.  People would send me friend request for the sole purpose of having an opponent.  It is so unnecessary once you know this way.  Not straightforward, but it works.  I'd rather just play someone this way instead of having to see people's posts in my feed.

ANIMATED GIF TEST FOR FACEBOOK

FACEBOOK SEARCH IN GROUPS

I help administer the Facebook group "Newtown High School Elmhurst, New York Alumni". Every now and then someone new would ask, "I am from Class of xxxx, are there anyone else from my year?", where xxxx would be some year, e.g. 1985 or 1967.  Being the vigilant admin that I am, I would use the search function to find messages in the group containing that year number.  I periodically ask new members to announce themselves, such as stating their names and years.  Subsequent searches would easily find people of the same year.  I tried to create a spreadsheet but that takes forever.

The Search gadget is not too hard to find on a laptop or desktop computer.  It's the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the group's main page.  But on a mobile device, such as the iPhone, with the mobile Facebook site or in the Facebook app, that is not the case.

On a desktop or laptop computer, the Search gadget is invoked by clicking the magnifying glass in the upper right of the group's main page, highlighted by the red oval above.

A sample search for "1993" yielded many hits.  Some hits are obvious, others you need to click on to see comments related to the entry.

As far as I know, there is no way to carry out a search using the Facebook app.  You can do some administration of the group, but no way can you find a certain phrase or word in the group.  The one search function the app has applies to the whole Facebook universe.

That leaves the mobile Facebook web page.  I specified "mobile" because for better use of limited screen real estate, when you put www.facebook.com into Safari (or some browser) you don't see the Facebook presented to a desktop user.  (From this point on, "desktop" implies "laptop" as well.)  You see some essential stuff, but things are reformatted so you don't have to zoom around. When you get to a group, the admin options are just as limited as the app.  But there is hope!

Perhaps you already know that at the top of the screen, on the left, there is this gadget consisting of three horizontal bars.  Click on it and you can get to your Groups, your Pages, very much what you would find on the left side of a Facebook screen on a desktop.  Scroll all the way to the bottom and you have the "Desktop Site" link.  Choose that and you no longer have to deal with the re-formatted Facebook view.  Of course, things look smaller, but that's the price you pay.  Just zoom in on the area surrounding the gadget and search away!

Click the gadget to get to Groups etc.

Desktop Site is what you would click to see the whole Facebook page, not the re-formatted version.

Hard to see, but there it is on the right near the top.

Just zoom in to enter what you need to search for.

FITNESS FOR FUN FACEBOOK EVENT

Happy October!  New month, new fitness challenge!

You may recall that I participated in some Facebook event in which participants aimed to run or do some kind of exercise every day of the month.  For October, my new-found friend Jessica made me co-host of the event, at this link

https://www.facebook.com/events/207159816124276/

Without warning, October arrived and I didn't promote the event much.  It didn't help that I started a new job that has an early start time and usually runs late into the evening.  Still, as co-host I went the extra mile and got up at 5 AM to put in a 3-km run, far fewer than my usual 8 km, but something is better than nothing.  I am not sure about tomorrow yet, as sunrise starts later and later and the weather is so cold that early in the morning.  Perhaps with more people joining the event I'll be more motivated to do my part.

Look forward to more people in the event!

Forwarders in the Age of FB

Back in the days, when e-mail was the primary form of electronic communication, some people just love to forward every little joke or "warning" that fell into their Inbox.  Fast forward a few hundred years to the Age of Facebook.  It seems those same "Forwarders" are now our FB friends.  Things are a bit different but essentially they entertain us with the latest news about addictive games they are playing, with YouTube videos, with witty remarks like "I am bored", etc ad nauseum.  Or so they thought it is all entertaining.  It is not.  What's worse, because of their sheer volume, these so-called status updates crowd out all the other posts.  It is the equivalent of speaking at a party using a megaphone, or having a seat on a crowded subway car and spreading your limbs all over.  In the beginning of my Facebook experience, I was guilty of inadvertently posting too much about the few games I play.  To gain the widest publicity possible, all apps on FB love to post onto your Wall every little interactions you have with it.  You can take control of the situation by making the proper settings.  From anywhere in FB, go to the upper right corner, click Account then Privacy Settings.  Go to the Apps and Websites section in the lower left and click Edit Your Settings.  In the Apps You Use section, click Edit Settings.  Find the apps that you no longer want it to write to your Wall and click its Edit Settings.  As an example, my dailymile app can post to my Wall.  Should I want to change that, I would click the Remove next to the Post To My Wall setting.

In the ideal world, everyone who reads this article would rush to their FB settings and tell all their apps not to post to their Wall any more.  That will not happen.  Even if it does happen, that would take care of just the posts from the apps.  What to do about the YouTube videos and such?  Hide 'em!  I think everything on your Wall can be hidden one way or another.  Put the mouse over it and an X gadget will appear on the upper right of that item.  Click it to see the different ways you can hide it.  You can hide just that one instance or the person who posted it.  In the example below, and it's just an example because I do not mind posts from the App Store at all, there is a third entry.  Maybe it is there because App Store used that App Publisher to do the posting, who knows.

Use it on someone who posts too frequently to keep your Wall manageable.  You can always go visit their profile page if you think you miss out on something.  Worst case scenario, you can always Unhide them by going to the Most Recent link (or whatever you may have it set to), choose Edit Options at the bottom of the list, and remove your friend from the bad list.  Unfriending someone because they post too often is drastic, so is quitting FB altogether.  Just hide them, it can be undone.

Find High School Friends On Facebook

I recently had a 25-year reunion with my high school classmates.  Some people liked the event so much they wanted to have another soon, like for the 27th or 30th anniversary.  A committee was quickly formed but it was decided that they will use a professional organizer for help with the locale, hotel, air travel, etc.  I don't know what they will do about finding more classmates.  We had about one hundred classmates for the recent reunion, with perhaps 200 to 300 on Facebook.  Like sending out resumes, the number of people actually going to a reunion will be a percent of the people located, so it helps to find as many people as possible.  Here's what I and other members of my reunion committee did to find people.

Recall that we already had a Google Doc with all the student names from the yearbook and the commencement roster.  The next thing we did was to search for people in Facebook, the definitive social network of the day.  I discovered that there are a few high schools named Newtown around the world.  There was one in Australia, another in Pennsylvania (albeit that one was Marple Newtown High School), one named exactly the same as mine, right nearby in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.  My Newtown was in Elmhurst, Queens, New York.  Facebook is smart enough to offer the choices but people still make mistakes so not everyone who indicated that they graduated from Newtown High in Elmhurst really belong there.

With about 300 people indicating they are Class of 1985 from Elmhurst's Newtown High, the search is almost over, right?  Even if you subtract 5% for those stumblers from the other Newtown, you still have about 280 people to put together a party with, yes?  Unfortunately, some of those people may be just placebooks, i.e. inactive people on Facebook, like those fake books that take up space on a shelf just to show what a full shelf looks like.  Take away another 5% or so.  It's time to tap into the general population on Facebook.

In these days and age, some people think it is easy to find people on the Internet.  Those Classmates.com ads make it sound easy, but it is far from it.  Especially if you don't want to spend any money.  Still, everyone is on Facebook, right?  All you need to do is type in the person's first name and last name then your old friend would be a Friend Request away.  In reality, many of the people we tried to locate had common names that when searched by names alone returned too many hits.  "John Smith" is understandably too common a name, but names in other ethnic groups that may sound uncommon to us turned out to be extremely popular for those cultures.

The clever idea my search partner, M.P., in the Reunion Committee came up with was to search for unique names.  Sure there are some names that we were mistaken about their uniqueness but there are some that are truly unique.  Remember that I mentioned before about the commencement roster listing middle initials?  Combined with the unique names, the middle initials can really help pinpoint a person.  There are many people to find and some people keep in touch with a small circle of friends years after graduation.  Always hope that those people with less common names are still friends with those with common names.  Sometimes we get lucky and the person has a photo that is recognizable.  One of the fun in locating high school classmates was seeing how people change yet certain traits remain.  Find 'em, Friend 'em, let's party!  M.P. was so good at it that she triggered FB's spam detector and got her account suspended.  The lesson here is to go easy with the friending on FB.  Spread the work out among the other board members.

Life is not always so rosy.  There were cases where we found the people, confirmed their identity, maybe even befriended them, only to have them, for whatever reason, drop off FB altogether.  Whenever possible, grab your friends' regular email address and keep it somewhere safe.  Someday FB may start charging money for its use and people may leave it en mass, like some of those groups that sometimes proclaim.

Facebook Death

I recently found out a Facebook friend of mine died. I used to play Wordscraper with him. It was probably Scrabulous, which was the forerunner of Wordscraper before the Agarwalla brothers got sued by Hasbro. Not that it really matters to this story.

One reason I remember "Mr. B" well is that most Wordscraper players, in my own experience, are Canadian women. He was one of the few non-Canadian male players. Together we wasted some time playing the word games, chatted from time to time about the game at hand or other topics that happened to come up. I now recall that he had a pizzeria business and had an iBook. The last remark he made was when I played the word REBAR. He joked that he did not know that I was in the construction business.

Oddly enough, for some reason I thought he unfriended me, since he no longer appeared on my friends list. Maybe I forgot what his last name was and could not find him in my friends list. No harm, I myself unfriended people from time to time, whether for lack of activity or some offending status update by the person. Recently I decided to visit his profile and saw that someone had written "Rest in peace" on his Wall. Probably someone who knew him outside of Facebook. That explained the lack of activity. I think I started some games with him only to delete them because he would not play his turn. Re-visiting his profile, I found a few keywords that allowed me to Google for more info about him. It turned out he passed away a little more than a year ago. Time flies and Life is fragile. Rest in peace, indeed, Mr. B, though I hardly knew you.

Impossible Resolutions 2009

Facebook - Share Photos With Groups

I've been active in helping run my high school reunion scheduled for next year. We have a Facebook group, naturally, and found a few hundred people already. It is great to see the old photos when someone managed to dig them up and share them. Most of the time though, the owners of the photos only share them via their personal albums. One would have to be friends with the owners to know about the photos. I suggested that the owners share the photos with the group but most of them don't know how. So here it is, the step-by-step process of sharing a photo, which was already uploaded to one's personal album, with a group.

For this example, I will post a photo that I already put into my personal album called "Recycling". The group that I will post the photo, that of a recycling bin under the sink, to the group called "I Love Recycling".

First I went to my list of groups. There are many ways to get there. You can go to lower corner of any Facebook screen to click on the Groups icon, which is a picture of 2 people, blue one on the left and a black one on the right. The way FB present the groups can be annoying. It defaults to show only those with recent activities on the right, plus groups that your friends have activities in on the left, so that the group that you want to get to may not be visible right away. If that's the case, you would need to click the See All but on the right side to see all your groups. Even then your groups list will not be in alphabetical order but rather in order of activities. Find the group you want to add the photo and click it. (I'll assume everyone uses a Mac and there is only one button to click. I sure wish life is really that simple, but I digress...)

Once in the group, scroll down to below the Wall Posts and above the Link List to find the Photos section. Click Add Photos.
As shown in the screenshot below, you want to have the tab called Add From My Photos selected. You can upload photos from scratch but why repeat the work? In my mind, the only time you want to do that is if you don't want to share certain comments people already added to the photos that were already uploaded into your album.
You may have many albums and again FB annoyingly doesn't list things alphabetical by default but rather by creation date, or some other way. Find your album and click it.
To add just the photo of the bin under the sink, I clicked its checkbox. Note that the photo of the standing bin in the dark is already selected. I added that photo earlier so it remains selected. To finalize this part of the process, I clicked Add Selected Photos.

If I have many photos to add, there is a Select All button on the right, but my screenshot doesn't show it.
Back in the "I Love Recycling" group, my new photo is now shown as the latest addition to the group's photos album. Done!

Save More Time With Facebook - Open in Tab

One of my Facebook activities is checking out the other groups for Newtown High School. I would search for the phrase "Newtown High School" and end up with a long list. It turns out the Newtown H.S. in Elmhurst, NY is not the only Newtown H.S. out there. There's one in Sydney, Australia, then one somewhere in Pennsylvania, and one in the New York metro area, up north in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. From the list the search return, I would go to those groups and see if there's anything good to learn about my old school. Some groups have pictures of articles from the school newspapers, others pictures of the school or the surrounding area. I sure regret throwing away my little collection of the school newspapers when I moved back in 1999. How would I know then that 10 years later I would scramble through my worldly possession looking for anything Newtown-related?

Back with the search list. If I simply click on a link to a group, the group page would open up in the same browser window. I may wander from there and before I realized it, I would be far from the lsearch list. I can use the browser's Back button to trace my way back, or the History list in the browser, but both methods are tedious. The better way would be to use the browser's support of tabs. Instead of just clicking a link, on my Mac, I would first hold down the ctrl key. As I click the link, I have the option to open the link in a new tab or new window, along with other options irrelevant to this post. In the new tab, I can wander on and on and when done I can just close that tab and return to the search list and explore the next group. For the Windows crowd, I think the right mouse button does the job of showing "open in new tab".

There you have it. With all that time saved, you can spend more time in Mafia Wars or whatever silly Facebook game you are addicted to.

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.

The Angst of Internet Oh-Nine

What do you do when you realize you spent hours wasted on Facebook and other social networks? You make the most of the experience by drawing a cartoon about it, of course!

I must say I am not that much into Twitter. While I did start out on Twitter I found the "conversations" there too messy. I don't see how people follow hundreds of people with Twitter. I only followed a handful and had to drop some people who tweeted too often. I still use the web browser instead of some fancy Twitter client so I don't see threaded messages. I prefer to see a variety of tweets, so if one person monopolizes my Twitter page, off he goes.

Plurk, on the other hand, keeps messages threaded so that you see both the original posts and replies to them. How logical! And no need to do @ and #, just address the person's name and it's automatically highlighted. I even use Plurk to update my FB and Twitter status now. You just have to watch your karma, a point system that probably doesn't mean anything, but fun to maintain. Don't plurk for a day or two and it drops fast, whereas climbing back up is measured in units of .01.

I also spent a lot of time on the reunion for my high school class, Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, Class of 1985. I had to sneak the school reference into the cartoon. Hopefully I'll snare a few more alumni.

Waste Less

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? But too much Facebook time and Plurking sure waste a lot of Jack's time, too. Here's how to waste less with all these social networking activities. Especially applicable if you find yourself constantly checking email, Twitter updates, new Wall writings, or blog comments...

• Gmail's Select Unread followed by Mark Read is a good thing to use. Nowadays a lot of my mail is not personal stuff, but not spam either, like announcement for new games from distributors that I like to know about, newsletters, news alerts, etc. When time is tight, just make them all Read and move on.
• In Plurk, Mark All As Read is my friend. I don't follow that many people but some days there are still 20 or more new entries. Mark All As Read is what I do, then if I have time I go back to read some entries. BTW, I never understand how people follow 100s or 1000s of people. You lose that personal connections at that high number.
• Also in Plurk, how about check up on things only if there are x updates? I use 5, but feel free to bump that number up. Then resist the urge to check Plurk when there are fewer than that figure. Likewise, you can do the same with email, unless you have some really urgent email expected.
  
• In Facebook, if you play some word games in which each game has x matches, pay attention to what score your opponent has at the end. If he already played all his matches and has a total of 100, no need to earn 1000 points, just 101 is enough to win.
• Also in Facebook, visit your groups only if there are new activities. Or maybe just once a week will do. Some groups either have too much activities or too little, so once a week is a good schedule.
• Buying bones for your neighbor's dog so he can leave your Lil Green Patch alone? Like how Costco and BJ's work, buy in bulk so you don't have to buy so often. Better yet, scrap the app altogether. It is OK to ignore these inane back-and-forth giving.

There, with all the time you save, you can go join some more back-and-forth giving schemes...

184 - Text Twirl

Some months ago someone, a relative or friend I cannot remember, invited me to join Facebook. I joined the social network and did not think much of it. OK, so there's a blog-like thingy called Notes, a bunch of groups you can join, a bunch of other apps. As a matter of fact, it seemed there were too many apps to go through. I figured I would try it out for a few weeks and perhaps it would become abandoned like thoseGeocities web sites I setup in the early days of the web.

One day I decided to check out the word games in Facebook. Perhaps I read about the Scrabulous lawsuit and wanted to see what other word games are out there. I played Scrabbles before and found it not that great as a vocabulary-builder. You can have be a crossword wizard but if you don't know the handful of Q words without U you may not make it far with Scrabbles. I enjoyed playing Super Text Twist before so naturally I gave Text Twirl a twirl. Then my good friendTello challenged me to a game or two of Text Twirl as well. Not just Text Twirl, as it seemed Tello spends most of his living minutes checking out Facebook apps. We played Scramble, Word Twist, and of course Scrabulous. I even started playing Text Twirl against non-friend Facebook players. In short, I became addicted without knowing it.

Here is one positive thing to come out of the addiction - a cartoon from me after a brief hiatus. It is true - each game takes only 2 or 3 minutes to complete, but together they all add up. Like any addiction, once you are hooked on Facebook word games, your productivity is sucked into the void.