A lifeline for your ‘Timeline’

AUSTIN, Texas —When Facebook announced the billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram — a hip, simple photo-sharing mobile app that has more than 35 million users — it was a sign that as big and powerful as Facebook has become, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, still recognizes that there are plenty of ways it can improve what it offers its more than 845 million active users.

It also showed that Facebook recognizes that it has many competitors who matter, from titans such as Apple and Google to scrappy upstarts such as Pinterest, who’d love to steal a big piece of Facebook’s thunder.

That’s good, because for users, Facebook can be a baffling, arbitrary place. The site is simple to join, but frustrating when you get used to using certain options that disappear in a redesign or when you try to do something more complex than posting a status update to the whole world.

There are menus seemingly hidden everywhere, and sometimes those menus don’t work in some areas of the website or when you use Facebook on a mobile phone or tablet.

So in the interest of helping those who are confounded by Facebook (myself included), here are some answers to problems I solicited from social network friends who described some of their Facebook frustrations. Unfortunately, although I have a few solutions, some of the complaints I got simply aren’t solvable in Facebook’s current state.

Let’s start with the basics.

Posting and privacy

When Facebook forced all users to switch to “Timeline” view, many options and menus changed, but one of the most important ones is still at the top of the righthand side of every page. Next to the “Home” button is a tiny triangle that opens up menus for “Account Settings” and “Privacy Settings.”

Here you can change your information — such as your email address or name — and download a copy of your Facebook data (useful if you plan to quit Facebook and want to take your data with you). In Privacy Settings, you can change who can see your Facebook posts and photos and what websites and apps can post on your Timeline.

Below your profile page Timeline photo (the giant image that takes up a big chunk of your profile page), you’ll see options for “Update Info,” where you can change your relationship status, where you’ve worked, your contact info and other personal stuff.

Next to that, “Activity Log” shows a list of everything you’ve done on Facebook. It can be filtered by year, and only you can see your own log. On this page, you can highlight posts or hide them from your Timeline.

Next to “Activity Log” is a little snowflake icon. Under that menu, “View As...” is a powerful feature that allows you to see your profile page as friends or as the public sees it. This is useful if you want to know whether your boss can see your vacation photos or if your relatives can view a status update you marked viewable only by your close friends.

Lastly, there’s a whole set of options within the status update box itself that many users, I imagine, rarely use or may not even be aware of.

These include the option to add or remove location information (the little map pin icon), the ability to set a date and time on a post (the clock) or the option to add someone to the post (the person icon). A dropdown menu next to the “Post” button lets you set whether your post will be viewable to the public, to friends, to lists of coworkers or groups, only to you or “Custom” to exclude specific people. Unfortunately, “Custom” isn’t available on some platforms, like mobile versions of Facebook.

That means you may not have the same options on a status update on a mobile phone or tablet that you do on a computer Web browser. And even within Facebook on a computer, the same status options aren’t available on the news feed page as they are when you update your status from your own profile page. Confusing and frustrating? Yes, it can be!

Whew! That’s a lot to remember. Let’s move on to specific problems and complaints.

What you can do

On a mobile phone, you can’t, among other things, share a post from someone else to your own friends, “Like” a comment on a photo or comment on someone else’s comments (known as threaded commenting).

There’s no easy way to edit a status update short of deleting and reposting. And although there’s a search bar at the top of every Facebook page, it’s useless for searching for anything on your own Timeline. (Strangely, Facebook offers an option to search for “Posts by Friends” but not for “Posts by Me.”)

The Facebook search option, however, is not completely worthless. Typing in a search term and using the filters on the left side of the page to narrow it down to, say, public Facebook posts, people or Web results can be very useful.

Facebook’s ability to grab an image from a link you post (and using it at the right size) is flaky. Also flaky are notifications on mobile versions of Facebook; they can disappear and reappear with no seeming basis in reality.

You can’t unfriend more than one person at a time. There’s no way to mark favorite posts or bookmark them to see them all in one place later. (You can “Highlight” your own posts, but that only makes them more prominent on your Timeline.)

You can see a specific time something was posted (by clicking on the day) and you can untag yourself from a photo and hide it from your Timeline if someone posts a picture of you that’s embarrassing. (Click the photo, use the “Options” menu at the bottom of the picture or “Remove” to the right of it.)

Facebook, as always, is a work in progress. Things that don’t work today may be improved tomorrow, or everything I’ve written in this column could be rendered out of date the next time Facebook rolls out a major site update.

It’s best to explore the menus whenever there are major site changes and be cautious with what you post at all times. If you’re truly stuck on a Facebook problem, post the question to your friends there. With 845 million others on the site, it’s virtually impossible that someone isn’t having the same issue.

Carolyn Hax

Tell Me About It

Dear Carolyn: My little brother and I used to be close, but have had a more tense relationship in recent years (I thought he needed to grow up, he thought I wasn’t fun anymore). I think there’s equal fault on both sides.

Anyway, I just found out he’s going to be a dad. I met the mom at a family event and she is very nice, but they both have to work very hard to make ends meet, so I know this is going to be tough on them. I’d really like to let my brother know that I think he’s doing a good thing by working hard to prepare to be a good dad and that I’d like to be there for him and his new family. But I don’t know how to say it. “I’m proud of you” sounds condescending. — Brother Having a Baby

Carolyn says: It