Beyond Timeline: 3 Tips for Facebook Users

For those who have mastered their new Facebook Timeline profiles, three features may have gone unnoticed in your scramble to find the perfect cover photo and clean up those old posts that Timeline revealed.

(Incidentally, if you haven’t opted for Timeline, the window is closing. Facebook expects to migrate all user profiles to the new format in the coming weeks. For now, users who switch to Timeline have seven days to edit their information  before it is published, but that grace period may not be available when Facebook automatically converts profiles next month.)

Here are the three features:

You may have missed some of your messages because the notification icon is not activated by the messages that Facebook houses under its “Other” category. See for yourself: Go to your wall and click on “Messages” in the left panel to reveal so-called other messages. While most of these are likely to be from brands you have “liked” on Facebook, the category also includes messages from people who are not on your list of friends. Who knows, you may discover someone new.

A neat hack reported on Reddit tells how you can add a teeny profile photo to chats on Facebook using Facebook IDs. Type in the first and last name of a friend separated by a period and surround it with double brackets, like this: [[name.name]]. If an image is too small to be recognized, hover over it for the name. Note that this works only for people you have marked as friends. If the person is not a friend, you’ll see the standard Facebook silhouette.

The same trick works for brand pages; just don’t use a period. For instance, type in [[cocacola]] to enliven a chat with a miniature bottle of Coke. The trick works for all pages. If you’re not sure of a spelling, go to the page in question, look in your browser’s address bar and copy the part of the address following the “.com” — that’s the Facebook ID.

Facebook last week launched an extension of its Events feature called Suggested Events, which uses information from your profile to predict events you might enjoy. Upcoming events are compiled from ones that Facebook friends ” href=”/cms/articles/3457-facebookers-count-happy-number-friends”>Facebook friends are attending, places you’ve checked into in the past, pages you’ve “liked” and music you’ve listened to.

Each listing includes a brief description, a picture and a line explaining your connection to the event — often simply that someone from your friends list has indicated he or she might attend — plus the option to accept Facebook’s invitation outright with a “join” or a “maybe.” Once you’ve accepted an event, your profile photo will be added to the list of attendees for the event. If you’re not interested, simply ignore it.

Facebook culls events from those marked “public.” With the new feature, organizers of public events hope to get more exposure for them without relying on users to spread the word. It’s another use of what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing,”  like its news and radio apps.