How to delete a profile picture or cover photo from Facebook

So last week, I uploaded 2 cover photos to my Facebook page so I could see which one looked better. After deciding which cover photo I wanted to use, I couldn’t figure out how to delete the one I didn’t want to use. I understand cover photos are suppose to be public, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to delete cover photos that aren’t active. I searched around a bit and no one had a really good answer that showed me how to delete a cover photo.

So I decided to see if I can get around this by seeing how photos are normally deleted. To delete a photo these days, it appears you have to click on Edit Album > Edit Photos and underneath each photo is a Delete checkbox.

On my Cover Photos album, I was missing the Edit Albums link.

Turns out if you can get to your Edit Photos page for your Cover Photos, you CAN delete your cover photos!

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Find a working Edit Photos link by going into any photo album (other than your Cover Photos), click on Edit Album and right click Edit Photos and copy the link. It should look something like: https://www.facebook.com/editphoto.php?aid=461756&id=270425625146&session_id=9999999999

Edit Photos link

Edit Photos link

2. Next go to your Cover Photos album and take note of the URL. It should look something like: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151348016065147.815154.270425625146&type=3

3. What you need to do now is modify the Edit Photos link you got from step 1 and with data you got in step 2. Notice the string of numbers in the middle of the URL from step 2. Break them apart at each dot so they look something like:
10151348016065147
815154
270425625146

Take the 2nd # (815154 in my case) and replace the # after aid= in the link from step 1.

The resulting URL you would get should look like: https://www.facebook.com/editphoto.php?aid=815154&id=270425625146&session_id=9999999999.

4. Enter that URL into your browser and you should now be able to delete photos from your Cover Photos album.

To delete a profile picture, you would do the same thing, but instead of using the URL from your Cover Photos album, you would use the URL from your Profile Pictures album.

Enjoy!

Taking Advantage of Facebook Friends List for Privacy Control

The first one is always the hardest. At first I was hesitant. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do it. I was afraid since it was an undo-able action. There was no CTRL+Z. But once I started doing it, I got a certain high out of it. Then it became fun.

This post has been in my drafts since September 2010 and I’ve been meaning to post it, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post it publically on my blog. Then I started thinking what the purpose of the post was and decided it was merely for educational purposes.

That weekend in September, I broke 400 friends on Facebook. That got me thinking… I should probably really start cleaning up my friends list. De-friending someone seems like such cruel thing to do. Plus you also lose access to their information. But I eventually made the decision that removing friends was the correct option.

The first remove was definitely the hardest. My mouse pointer was hovering above the “Remove from Friends” link as I was hesitant to actually click it. Funny thing is after I clicked it, there was a confirm or cancel dialog making me ponder once again if I wanted to remove this specific person.

remove from friends button

After removing the first friend or two, I began to get a weird adrenaline rush and it began to feel fun removing friends. There were people I can’t even remember how I knew. Those were the easiest to get rid of. I’ve whittled my friends list down to 382. Not too impressive, I know.

However, I soon hit into the wall of friends who I remember, but never or hardly ever talk to. Would I ever talk to them again? Probably. Do I really care? Who knows. After pondering for a couple days, I decided to redo my entire Facebook privacy control. The nice thing about friends list is that other friends have no idea what lists they are on.

I already had a list for my “Inner Circle” and thought maybe I should create a list of friends to exclude from my regular postings. However, I soon realized that a white list was much better at what I wanted to do than a black list. I initially named the list “Outer Circle”, but ended up dropping the Outer prefix since they were still part of my circle, just not my inner circle. It’s a pity that Facebook doesn’t allow groups within groups, since if I want to add a friend to my “Inner Circle”, I also have to add them to my “Circle”.

I then went and change most of my defaults (e.g. wall, posts, comments, things I share, things others share, contact info, etc.) to my “circle” friends list. The only significant thing I gave broader access to was my photos which I typically share to friends of friends. People outside of my circle still have access to some contact info, where I work, and are able to message me.

I go through the list every couple months removing people I no longer talk to. My current “circle” list is at 168 friends, which is a much more manageable size than 400. I usually add new friends into the “circle” list, and if it turns out I don’t talk with them, they’ll get removed during my next cleaning.

Another nice thing is that even though all my posts default to my “circle” list, I can easily change it to all my friends or friends of friends by clicking on that security lock. This prevents me from actually posting something for the entire world to see, and if I screwed up the privacy settings, I can easily delete that post and post again with the correct privacy settings.

As I mentioned earlier, I was originally hesitant to make this post public. My guess if you’re reading my blog or actually see this post on my wall, you’re already part of my “circle” list. If you aren’t, feel free to give me a ping. (^_^x)

Friendships

lucky plant Several days ago, Ryan shared this interesting article: America: Land of Loners? It was definitely a very interesting read, though the 1st half of the article I thought was much more well written than the latter half. I don’t fully agree with every point, but it’s definitely good discussion material. The overall point of the story stroke a chord close to home.

The article is a bit long, but very inspirational. Several commentators said they called up good friends which they’ve lost touch with. Two passages that I liked particularly are:

Aristotle, who saw friendship as essential to human flourishing, shrewdly observed that it comes in three distinct flavors: those based on usefulness (contacts), on pleasure (drinking buddies), and on a shared pursuit of virtue—the highest form of all. True friends, he contended, are simply drawn to the goodness in one another, goodness that today we might define in terms of common passions and sensibilities.

[…] convinced that more Americans are lonely—not because we have fewer social contacts, but because the ones we have are more harried and less meaningful.

Valerie also shared an interesting letter that Hong Kong TV host Michael Leung wrote to his son: 下輩子,無論愛與不愛,都不會再見 (Doesn’t Matter If We Love Each Other Or Not, We Will Not Meet In The Next Life). Unfortunately the letter is Chinese and although very touching and insightful, all the online translation tools are doing a rather horrible job translating it into English. However, I did find someone who has already spent the time translating so I don’t have to: English Translation.

The 2 passages that I wanted to share are:

(一)對你不好的人,你不要太介懷,在你一生中,沒有人有義務要對你好,除了我和你媽媽。至於那些對你好的人,你除了要珍惜、感恩外,也請多防備一點,因為,每個人做每件事,總有一個原因,他對你好,未必真的是因為喜歡你,請你必須搞清楚,而不必太快將對方看作真朋友。

(1) Don’t mind people who aren’t nice to you. In your life, no one has the obligation to be nice to you, besides your mother and I. In regards to people who are nice to you, besides treasuring and appreciating them, please also be careful. Because there’s always a reason for anyone to do anything. Being nice to you might not mean they like you. Please make sure of that and don’t be too quick in trusting people as true friends.

(七)你可以要求自己守信,但不能要求別人守信,你可以要求自己對人好,但不能期待人家對你。你怎樣對人,並不代表人家就會怎樣對你,如果看不透這一點,你只會徒添不必要的煩惱。

(7) You can demand yourself to be trustworthy, but you can’t make others be trustworthy. You can demand yourself to treat others well, but not make others. How you treat other people, doesn’t represent how others will treat you. If you can’t see through this point, you’ll just become frustrated.

So now that I’ve set up my post, it’s time for me to tell you my story. I really like how Aristotle bucketed friends into the 3 categories: utility, pleasure, and true friends. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain what friends of utility and pleasure are, but true friends are hard to describe. Not all friends need to fit into 1 single category. They can easily overlap multiple. And no one starts out as a true friend.

Just a few days ago, I forget how this topic came up, but I was describing to Chris how I would determine if someone is really a true friend. I told him if a true friend came up to me and asked if he could borrow (undisclosed amount) of money, I wouldn’t hesitate to give it to them. If a true friend needed a kidney or a liver transplant and mine matched, I would not hesitate to give it to them. As the Chinese saying goes: 赴湯蹈火 (willing to go through water and fire to help). I understand this is a very romanticized view and I haven’t really been put to the test, but I honestly think there are a few people that I’d be willing to go to all extents to help.

In the first article, Daniel Akst brings up the point that our friendships these days are less meaningful, and I agree with that. Besides the courtesy hello I say to my neighbors when I bump into them, I never really talk to them. I did bake cookies for some neighbors some time ago, but that was because they had helped me during the snow storm. Thinking back when I was a kid, I knew practically every family up and down my street. The concept of community and family is not as meaningful anymore nor the bonds as tight as before. Chris told me he knew of a co-worker that worked in the bay area, but his wife lives on the east coast with their child and they meet once a month. Dave and I were surprised a family could even work that way.

In the past, the place you were born was the place you died. The people you grew up around were always the same people, so forming strong bonds were simple. These days, we’re very mobile. We go far away for college, for careers, and the more you move around, the harder it becomes to make strong bonds with people. It’s just human nature to form stronger friendships with people you see frequently and friends you hardly see anymore slowly become more and more distant. That was what happened after I went to college, then again when I moved up to Seattle for work.

However, I think technology and Facebook has made staying connected much more easier. I disagree that having a ton of friends on Facebook has diluted friendships. Not all Facebook friends are equal, just like in real life. I have many acquaintances, but only a few true friends. In effect, technology has removed the physical distance which was a huge barrier for developing strong friendships.

With that said, it wasn’t until very recently which I’ve been pro-active in trying to build and rebuild friendships. In the past, I was very passive. Friends would come and go, and I would never really pursue them. It was never hard for me to make new friends as my personality is generally cheerful and helpful. However, I’ve realized that there are friendships I want to maintain and not lose. It may be cliché to say friendship is a 2-way street, but it really requires both sides to put in an effort. When one side doesn’t really care (me in the past), it’s hard to make it strong and that’s when something as silly as distance can easily break it.

I hope my post has been interesting, if not inspirational. And good luck! (^_^x)

Locking Down Facebook

evil facebook For the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly locking down Facebook, altering privacy settings, removing data I once thought it was fun to share, and removing applications which I no longer use. If I could, I would delete my Facebook account altogether, but I’ve become dependent on it to keep in touch with friends who I would never keep in contact with otherwise.

You may also noticed I’ve been using Twitter a lot less this past week. Initially I thought of using Twitter to post random crap which I used to post on my blog. Now that I think about it, do I really care about random people reading my crap, which ends up as spam on my friends’ feeds. I also thought about making my Twitter account protected, but then what’s the point of Twitter since a protected account serves basically the same function as Facebook. Plus Facebook gives you more characters and control! I’ll still be using Twitter to promote my HD-Trailers.net website (hdtrailers), but that’s really the only benefit of Twitter that I see at this point. I guess the one good thing that came out of Twitter so far is that I met some new friends.

Friend Lists

One thing new about Facebook that I found out recently is that you can create friend lists. Friend lists are especially useful when you want to post something to share with your friends, that you might not exactly want your boss or co-workers to know. Mashable has a pretty good tutorial on how to create such a list: HOW TO: Create Friend Lists on Facebook. Now when you post new things on Facebook, you’ll notice the little lock icon near the bottom right of the input area, and that lets you control who gets to see what you’re about to post.

Privacy

Privacy settings are one of the newer things that Facebook has added (due to backlash from the community) and I have to say they’ve done a pretty good job. I’d like more control, but for what they have, it’s not bad. To get access to your privacy settings, near the upper-right corner, click on Account, followed by Privacy Settings.

Profile Information
facebook profile privacy

The first on the list is your profile. Here you control who gets to see what on your information tab. Back to the previous topic of friend lists, you can now even restrict particular info to just a specific group of friends, which I found useful.

Another useful tool Facebook provides is the ability to preview your profile in the eyes of a random stranger or friend. The button to do so is near the upper right corner.

Contact Information
facebook contact privacy

Similarly this page allows you to control who gets to see the different ways they can contact you (via phone, email, IM, etc.) Also, I know pixelization isn’t the best way to hide my email, but if you can figure out my email address(es) from that screenshot, kudos to you!

Applications and Websites

I’m actually not sure what Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards refers to, so I’ve restricted to just a small set of friends for now. The Instant Personalization is definitely new as I did not see it several days ago. I’m guessing this is part of their Open Graph feature they’ve just announced. I’ve decided to uncheck it until I fully understand what it does.

One particular interesting setting in this section is the What your friends can share about you. From the title, it sounds a bit harmless, but you have to understand that it’s what your friends share about you to websites and applications, and most of the time, they’re not informed what information they’re sharing about you. I’ve decided to uncheck everything on this page:
facebook friends share settings

Applications

I’ve always disliked the fact that I had to reveal all my personal info and give up friends’ data when I wanted to use an application. Why does a game like Farmville need to know my birthday or where I live? So over the past week, I’ve gone and removed all the applications which I no longer use and the ones I decided I could live without. ReadWriteWeb has a good tutorial on how to remove applications: How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should)

facebook authorized apps

Facebook: Friends Suggester

So for the longest time (and Derek can be my witness), I’ve wanted a Friends Suggester feature in Facebook. What a Friends Suggester is is a tool that’ll automatically suggest people who you might know based on who your friends are. In other words, typically if 5 of your friends know a particular person that isn’t your friend yet, there is a likely chance this particular person is someone you know too.

Anyway, when Facebook Apps were starting, I thought an app like this would quickly show up. At first we thought it wasn’t possible due to privacy reasons, but it turns out that your friends list is typically open to public and all the app would need is just the list of friends of all your friends and then do some mashing work.

When Facebook introduced Suggest A Friend, I thought that was what I was looking for. However, it turns out it was meant so you as a human (and not the computer) to suggest friends to new people on Facebook.

A week or 2 ago, Facebook finally added what’s been long overdue: People You May Know:

People You May Know
Found based on your existing connections

Do you know any of these people?
Add people you know as friends to make these results even better for you.

This is exactly what Friends Suggester is. It shows you a list of people that it thinks you might know and even shows the list of common friends between you two. I’ve already added 5+ friends since I found this tool.

There are still some ways to improve it. Currently they only suggest 25 people randomly to you. If you refresh the page, the list changes with some new and some old. There appears to be no order of any sort and algorithm to determine which people you’re more likely to be friends with. I’d say the more friends you share between each other, the more likely you two are friends. Having the ability to see ALL suggested friends, even if it iterates over many pages, would be nice. Sitting here hitting refresh hoping to find a friend that may pop up after awhile just isn’t that great.

Another thing they should add is the ability to discard people you don’t know. No matter how many times you show me person A, if I don’t know him, I’m not going to add him to my friends list. There is the case where you might end up being friends later, so maybe the ability to ignore a particular person for 3 months or 6 months would be another option.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with this new tool so far.

Update:

I knew I forgot something. I had also wanted it to automatically email me when it thinks a new possible friend pops up in the list or alert me somehow. However it turns out they already have this feature. I just got this email:

_____ just joined Facebook. You are getting notified of this because our “People You May Know” tool discovered you and _____ both work at Microsoft. If you do know _____, check out the links below.

To add _____ as a friend, follow this link:
____________________

To view _____’s profile, follow this link:
____________________

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Do I Ever Sleep?

So SueOn asked me this question earlier:

do you ever sleep?
or are you like chuck norris
you just wait

That reminded me of the Zuckerberg testimonies I was reading earlier. Apparently the court files for the case when Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) was sued for stealing the social networking idea from another student group were accidentally released to a journalist/reporter. According to Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy:

Social networking Web sites can seem dedicated to the idea that nobody’s personal life is worth keeping private, but when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg — the founder of Facebook, one of the largest networks — Facebook disagrees.

Facebook tried last week to force the magazine 02138 to remove some unflattering documents about Mr. Zuckerberg from its Web site. But a federal judge turned down the company’s request for a court order to take down the material, according to the magazine’s lawyers.

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit charging that in 2003 and 2004, as a student at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg stole the idea and some of the computer source code for Facebook from some fellow students. They were planning a networking site of their own and had hired Mr. Zuckerberg to help with the programming.

You can read the original article on 02138: Poking Facebook:

Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg created one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and became a paper billionaire as a result. But ongoing lawsuits suggest that Facebook’s origins are murkier than Zuckerberg would like to admit. Is the man many are calling Harvard’s next Bill Gates telling the truth?

and here are the court documents from the Facebook trial: The Facebook Files.

How does this relate to the the question SueOn had asked me? In one of his testimonies, the transcript goes as below (Q = question/attorney and A = answer/Zuckerberg):

Q: Okay. What time did you wake up in the morning?
A: It probably wasn’t the morning.
Q: Okay. How late did you stay up programming?
A: I don’t know, like it’s quiet at night.
Q: Okay.
A: You can get work done.
Q: Did you work all night sometimes?
A: Yeah. I mean although, I guess that’s relative when you’re shifted hours like that.

You can say I’m pulling all nighters every day, but that’s because I go to sleep in the early morning (4-6am).

The testimony got boring really fast, though I will say that he sounded quite scared and his replies reminded me of someone who wasn’t really a profession, but brand new to the field.