How To Save Your Facebook “A Look Back” Video

Today, Facebook celebrated 10 years of its existence and because of this august occasion they have decided to set up a program which compiles a personalized video which they call “A Look Back” and what others have been simply calling a “Lookback.” The Lookback shows you a highlight reel of your Facebook life. If you’d like to check it out you can go to Facebook.com/lookback. (Sidenote: In 4 days I will be celebrating 8 years on Facebook. Woah!)

The only problem with the video is, cool as it is, I don’t necessarily want to drive everyone to my Facebook page in order to see the video and I would like to be able to keep a copy for myself. Luckily, someone on the interwebs figured it out so I thought I would share it you, my readers. Below you’ll find my video uploaded onto YouTube and instructions for downloading your own video using Google Chrome.

(Note: The video it downloads is NOT the HD version just the 480p. If you know how to force it to grab the HD one let me know and I can add the info in here.)

And now, the instructions for how to do it for yourself!

1. Open the link http://www.facebook.com/lookback
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+J to open the Console.
3. Copy the whole code at http://textuploader.com/14qr and paste into the Console then press Enter.
4. The Console dialog will gives you a link to the video for download.
5. Right click the link and select “Save Link As” to download and save it.
6. Do whatever you’d like with it! Upload it anywhere!
7. Enjoy 🙂

In case you’re wondering, according to TIME Magazine Tech I have wasted this much of my life on Facebook assuming I have spent an average of 37 minutes per day on it since I joined. (An average person spends 17 minutes per day so I just increased it a lot.)

Piece By Piece Facebook Is Dying…& Promoters Are Killing It

Promoters are killing Facebook. Someone make them stop, please.

One of the greatest features about Facebook which I use above all else on the site is the Messaging/Chat app and feature. But promoters seem to want to kill it and drive it to irrelevancy as quickly as they did Events. Exhibit A is above. This really happened and I am still waiting for his response. (I don’t actually expect one.)

In February 2011, @unmarketing aka Scott Stratten wrote a blog post “How We Are Killing Facebook” which talked about how people are killing Facebook by creating what he called “event apathy.” Essentially, event apathy is caused by people using Facebook to invite others to events that are just completely not targeted towards them (be it due to them living thousands of miles away from the event, being not interested in the topic, or being outside the target demographic, among a host of other reasons). Because of this, as Scott mentions, many people have begun to ignore Facebook Event invites to the point that the function may not as well be on Facebook at all. I know I turned my event notifications off months ago because, quite frankly, they were getting too darn annoying and were draining my cell phone’s battery. I’ve had people miss events that I invited them to that I know they would have loved coming to because they simply didn’t see the invite. I know a number of people who have once again begun using services such as Evite or Paperless Post because they know we still check our emails but ignore Facebook events.

Who is to blame for this? Scott doesn’t really narrow it down in his post but I am going to because they are the worst offenders: Promoters.

Before I go on let me be clear I have nothing against promoters. Heck, I am currently partially responsible for running one group’s Twitter account: @ElevateUrNight where I am making it more awesome and less spammy than any other promoter’s Twitter feed I have ever seen. Go on, check it out, I’ll wait right here.

Why Do Brands Expect Us To Find Them On Social Media?

As the title of this post implies today we are going to talk about brands and how they expect the consumer/customer to interact with them. I have been seeing quite a few ads and commercials recently where the advertiser wants to show their 21st Century savvy and how they are available on different social media platforms but they do it like you see in the picture above. The announce to the world (or whoever is seeing the ad) that, yes, they are present on those platforms but they seem to think that we all like to play a game of Where’s Waldo with them.

Waldo via Waldo Wiki

 I mean, I loved sitting on trips with my family when I was a kid and opening one of the Where’s Waldo books but that was recreational and something to do when we were sitting in an airport/on a plane/in a car and had nothing better to do. The point of advertising and being present on the various social media platforms is so that the consumer and potential customers can engage with the brand/advertiser. Don’t make it difficult for us!

This shouldn’t be news to anyone either. Heck, I recently was in the the new shop on Queen St West called Community 54 where they have old arcade video games from way back in the day. One of those games, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, was from late enough (1996) that they thought it relevant to mention that the game had a site on this newfangled thing called the Internet. But they didn’t just announce this fact, they didn’t put “WE ARE ON THE INTERNET” and expect people to go out and find them. If you look in the picture below you can see exactly what they wrote because I snapped a picture of it.

They told people to “Check out these WEB sites” and then listed them. Done. Consumer can easily interact with those two websites assuming they had computers and access to the Internet. But at leas they didn’t lose them in the potentially interested person having to do any work to engage with the brand.

Some more examples below:

And

To be fair, the second one of the above pictures, from Union Station in Toronto, they did point to the account @unionstationTO on Twitter for us to engage with but they didn’t bother for some reason with Facebook to do the same. My guess as to why this is is because they didn’t bother to get a custom URL for their page before printing up this signage (they have’t, it seems, bothered to register a custom URL even to this day). This is just laziness plain and simple (in my opinion).

In conclusion, this is a message to all Brands, Advertisers, and Marketers: Remove barriers to engagement don’t erect them.

Have you seen similar displays as I pictured above? Have you ever gone out and actually engaged with a brand afterward or did you just say screw it because it was too much work? Let me know in the comments below.

(And in case you are wondering, no I have never bothered looking into the above pictured brand’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. As well, here’s a link provided by the Way Back Internet Machine for Gretzky.com in 1998. I couldn’t get Midway.com because it just redirects to Warner Bros which bought their assets in 2009 when Midway went bankrupt.)

Facebook Messenger Beta For Windows 7 – I *LOVE* It!

I recently read about the release of a special beta of the new Facebook Messenger for Windows. This program for Windows 7 is standalone (it does not require your browser to be open) and yet leaves your Facebook Messenger open. Facebook Messenger aka Facebook Chat is honestly one of the primary reasons I still keep Facebook open on my computer and in my browser and this new little program gave me one less tab open in Chrome which I must say excited me. Immediately I went to https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-for-windows – the info page about this new tool – and downloaded this application for my computer via the page https://www.facebook.com/about/messenger which is linked on the “Help” page.

One huge thing – which seems simple but this is a program which solves a pure #FirstWorldProblem – is that because the program sits in your Windows 7 taskbar (at the bottom of the screen between the “tray” – where the time and date are – and the Start menu button) it responds like any other opened program or application. It lights up yellow (or whatever color your theme defines) and you can actually really notice it and find it easily. As well, I am a huge fan of Windows shortcuts. One of my main go to Windows shortcuts has always been ALT+TAB to quickly switch between running programs. Because my Facebook Messenger is now an entirely different entity running on my computer in of itself I can now quickly switch between, say, writing a blog post like this one and chatting all without touching the mouse! So much more efficient I love it!!!

If you are running Windows 7 and the messenger/chat is one of the primary reasons you use Facebook I highly recommend downloading this program.

Facebook Friendship Doesn’t Opt Me In To Your Email List! Online Etiquette For The 21st Century

I met a person in late April of 2010 (as evidence by the confirmation email of our friend status on Facebook still archived in my account) and have seen him once or twice since then but – as many of you already know – being a Facebook friend doesn’t mean you’re necessarily “real” friends. He added me to LinkedIn in May of this year and a couple of days after I accepted his invitation to connect I got an email from him with the subject: “Introduction to Real Estate.”

I had never given this guy my email address (aside from it being listed on LinkedIn and Facebook) and the email he sent was unsolicited and was all about how he was beginning a business as a ‘Real Estate Sales Representative.’ Great for him but I was confused as to how I had been added to his list of people to send the announcement to. I emailed him back and had the conversation you see below:

Note: The only changes I have made were to remove identifying information.

His reply to my final email as you see above was to explain to me how he did it. He either didn’t get how perturbed I was (read between the lines dude!) or didn’t care. I wasn’t happy about the whole thing but let it go after that because it didn’t seem worth fighting over and being a jerk about. I assumed I was not the only one who had the nerve to call him out on spamming people. I also, quite obviously, opted out of receiving further emails from him.

When he joined Twitter a month later – in June – he started following me. I gladly gave him some advice on how to be more effective for his business on Twitter thinking that helping him would mean he was less likely to be spamming people. I told him to first and foremost change the default profile picture which he did pretty quickly and then mentioned a couple of other things which seem pretty obvious to the average person who spends a lot of time on Twitter and the social web but may not be to others.

Then the night of December 12th I had another conversation with Lani. The conversation you see below is one that actually happened and is unedited. When reading it remember that I was half asleep as it began at 12:45am and that this wasn’t the first time that I had dealt with him and was already quite wary of the way he conducted himself online…remember I had also been following him on Twitter for half a year and saw him pretty much ignore all of my suggestions.

The full conversation, the only edit I have made is to white out his name.

If you read the beginning of our conversation you’ll see I was being as noncommittal as possible. I tried to avoid the issue giving brief sort of funny smart aleck answers to his questioning and he should have just left it at that. If someone isn’t at all interested in the conversation how far do you keep pushing? After I could see he wasn’t getting it I just straight up called him as I saw him – a spammer. I also sort of saw it as my right once he called me a ‘guru’ which I don’t think I am but if he was going to call me a guru which meant he considered me a master and leader and teacher I was going to do my duty to him and teach him. Sure I could have sugar-coated it but he clearly hadn’t gotten it before when I had tried to do that via our email exchange so this time I had had enough.

Oh, after this exchange he decided to unfriend me on Facebook. Sure, I was rude but was I in the right? I totally think so. What he had done with his email stunt was actually illegal according to Facebook’s rules. As you can see above, Facebook has very specific rules for people using Facebook and for protecting its user’s rights. The Facebook “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” says that “[i]f you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.” Lani’s entire argument for how he was

I know this was a long preamble but it brings me to a few points of etiquette that everyone should already be aware of but it seems they are not:

• If I hand you a business card that does not mean I am opting in for your email list. It means I want you to have my email and for you to personally be able to get in touch with me.
• Facebook friendship does not mean I have opted in to your email list.
• The fact that you have an opt-out option in your email list is irrelevant. Those listed have to have opted-in to your list in some way before you can send that first email. Even if it wasn’t a direct violation of Facebook’s rules and what is legal and illegal in Canada and the USA (according to privacy laws) it is an extreme breach of trust given to you when I friended you on Facebook.
• You are not Jean Valjean (aka 24601) and the fact that this is your livelihood you are breaking the law for does not make it OK to break the law and breach people’s trust by misusing their information. By that logic we should be doing nothing to stop spammers and hackers because it is their livelihood to do malicious things on the internet (OK, some of them are just jerks but you get the point).

Also, don’t call someone a guru if you don’t darn well mean it. I don’t think I am a guru, I think I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the knowledge I would need to amass before I could even hope to meet with a guru and be able to have an intelligent conversation with them beyond the words “Hello, my name is Dan.” BUT as I said above, if you submit yourself to my teachings by calling me a guru don’t get insulted when you don’t like what you hear. I call them as I see them and give people straight answers.

When people comment on this blog and when I comment on other people’s blogs (usually requiring an email address to be entered) I don’t expect to be added to mailing list. How many blogs have you seen which go out of their way to assure you that they take your privacy very seriously when you give them your email address, there’s a reason for that.

Do you have anything to add to this? Have things like this ever happened to you? Think I was too harsh on him in our Facebook conversation? Let me know!

 Sketched Mailbox with ‘@’ symbol aka MC900341788 via Microsoft Office

Facebook “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” You can find the full text here.

Facebook Clandestinely Adds Tag Approval! Hooray!

When I was writing my own post about the New Facebook Password Recovery Option I had also just found out about the option which Facebook had added something that I yearned for months ago and then was told wasn’t going to happen because it went against Facebook’s interests actually happened!

In a relatively recent blog post from the end of August called “Making It Easier to Share With Who You Want,” Facebook announced this very feature in the excerpt which I have pictured in a screenshot below.

Facebook Profile Tag Review Blog Post

 To activate this not so new feature all you need to do is go into your Facebook Privacy Settings here and there you will see the ‘How Tags Work’ option (pictured below).

Clicking the “Edit Settings” link will bring up this dialog box where you can edit all the settings on how you want your tags to work.

Facebook Adds Password Recovery Via ‘Trusted Friends’ Option

I have no idea how long this option has existed within Facebook. All I know is that I completely randomly found it earlier today when I was going through some security features in Facebook.* What I found was very much akin – in my mind – to the post I wrote a little while back about setting a friend’s email address as your recovery email address and likening it to a spare house key. (See: “Is Your Recovery Email Address The Spare House Key You Leave With A Friend?”)

*In case you don’t know how to get to these pages they are the Facebook Account Settings page and the Facebook Security Settings page and both of those are direct links which should take you to them if you are logged in to Facebook in your browser already. 

Basically, Facebook has started an option to choose 5 Facebook friends who you consider ‘Trusted Friends’ and if you ever have issues getting into your account and can’t access your recovery email address, for whatever reason, Facebook will send each of your trusted friends a security code. Then, all you need to do is get in touch with your friends and collect the codes. In order to set the whole thing up you have to choose between 3 to 5 Trusted Friends, although Facebook recommends choosing the full 5. Once you need to recover your password Facebook will, I assume, email/message all 5 of your Trusted Friends a code. You only need to get 3 out of the 5 codes sent to your various Trusted Friends in order to get access to your account back. A full description of the service is available on the “Opt-in Security Features” area in the “Facebook Help Center”.

I, of course, decided to opt right in as soon as I saw this option and set it up immediately. My main question is why hasn’t Facebook been pushing users to set this up as soon as they logged in to Facebook the day it was implemented? I can’t even find any mention of the option on the Facebook Blog even though I did a very specific search for “trusted friends” and also manually went through a a few pages of blog posts which took me all the way back to October 14, 2010.

Facebook requires you to re-enter your password before it will let you set up your 5 Trusted Friends.

When you first go to edit the Trusted Friends list,