How to See What Your Facebook Profile Looks Like to Others

Would you like to know what your Facebook profile looks like to other people?
Whether it's a job recruiter or a potential date checking out your online presence, it's a useful exercise to view just what you're putting out there via Facebook.

Take a look through our walkthrough to see what your public Facebook profile looks like. Let us know in the comments if you're happy with what your profile says about you.

1. View As

Head to your profile page and click on the cog icon that appears at the bottom right of your cover photo. Select the "View As" option.

2. Public

Facebook will then show you what your profile looks like to the average user, with whom you're not friends. You can scroll down your timeline to see which posts are viewable to the public, and take a look through your photos, "about" section, Likes, etc.

3. Specific Person

If you want to see how your profile looks to a specific Facebook friend, click the "View as Specific Person" text at the very top of the screen and enter his or her name. You will then see your profile through their eyes.

Turn Your Facebook Timeline Into an Actual Book With Likebooks

These days, your Facebook Timeline can serve as a digital scrapbook of your life: birthdays, graduations, weddings, trips to Disneyland and, yes, the time you got a puppy. A new service wants to help Facebook users move those memories from the cloud into a permanent, physical keepsake.
Likebooks will convert content from your Facebook Timeline and print it in a physical book, as shown in the video above. Your status updates, photos and comments from friends can be printed in your custom book. Content is either pulled from a specific date range or an entire year (as far back as 2007).
Depending on how much content you choose to archive, a Likebook can cost from $12 to $137 and can range from 25 to 500 pages. They even come in soft or hardcover.

Likebooks says Facebook users create enough content on the social network to fill about 100 pages of a physical book per year.
“Users already have several years of their personal life story on Facebook," Patrick Osinski, marketing director of Likebooks, said in a news release. "We provide a way to respond to the basic human need to gather, archive, and share the personal stories that are stored in social networks."
With most things moving from analog to digital nowadays, this is a definitely a reverse approach. But this physical memento could be fun as a coffee table conversation piece or simply on your own bookshelf when you want to casually stroll down digital memory lane.

How to Create a Top Secret Facebook Group

Did you know that you can create a totally, top secret group on Facebook that only you, and people you invite to join, can see?
We have taken a quick look at how to make such a group, and some essential settings once you've got it all set up.

Take a look through our easy-to-follow walkthrough in the how-to gallery above. Let us know in the comments if you use private Facebook Groups — and what you do with them (without giving away all your secrets).

Will Facebook's Account Verification System Discourage Impostors?

When Victor Diaz Zapanta was featured on Mashable for his Facebook account's creative timeline design, he was excited. But that sweet feeling soon soured slightly when the 29-year-old designer's account was parodied by impostors claiming to be him.
It happened at least four times, and at one point Facebook even suspended his profile, forcing the Washington, D.C., resident to verify his account way before Facebook introduced its new page and profile verification on Wednesday.
"I've been playing whack-a-mole with reporting fake profiles on Facebook every couple months," he says. "I'm guessing people were into the Facebook timeline I made and just don't think it's a big deal to impersonate someone."

That's because Zapanta thinks people were fascinated with his timeline-within-a-timeline image. Within hours of the Mashable story, which published in late 2011, Zapanta says he was inundated with friend requests and soon a slew of impersonators, mostly from Asia. He admits the attention was mildly flattering at first, but it soon turned into a headache "to explain to people when they try to add me on Facebook, that at this point, more often that not, there's somebody posing as me on Facebook. As a fairly social person, this is something that comes up for me pretty often."
So often, in fact, that

Zapanta still regularly finds new impostors, causing him to have trouble when he meets new people he'd like to be friends with online

Zapanta still regularly finds new impostors, causing him to have trouble when he meets new people he'd like to be friends with online. Because people are pretending to be him online. Facebook's new verification process was developed, in part, to help people like Zapanta curb these problems. The verification badge is now visible as a checkmark on accounts, much like the system employed by Twitter.
"We've built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down malicious pages, accounts and applications that attempt to spread spam by deceiving users or by exploiting several well-known browser vulnerabilities," Facebook told Mashable. "We have partnered with the leaders in the security industry to both block malicious websites and offer our users free security software to better protect themselves, no matter where they are on the web."

Specifics are still being ironed out as the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company refines the process, looking at tools to determine grounds for verification. But already, one potential problem with this fledgling system is that there is no way to request verification beyond contacting Facebook's help center.

And the problem with the system is that it seems to be primarily designed to help people find and interact with high-profile accounts.

And the problem with the system is that it seems to be primarily designed to help people find and interact with high-profile accounts. In other words, mainly those that belong to celebrities. Which is exactly what concerns Zapanta with the program. He says he's glad to see Facebook starting to verify accounts, but is worried that they'll focus more on people "with an extremely high number of subscribers." But the fear is that the verification system is targeted to famous people as opposed to regular folk. And that could expose a weakness in the system.
More than 140,000 people follow LockerGnome founder and tech personality Chris Pirillo on Facebook. He's also had trouble with parody accounts. And his own family has even been fooled by impostors.
"My wife added the wrong Chris Pirillo," he admits. That profile had Pirillo's same avatar and profile background. He says she was fooled because she didn't notice the different vanity URL. "It's easy to mistake the wrong person for the right one on Facebook, or any social network. The higher their profile, the higher the likelihood of their name or brand being spoofed and fans misled."
Pirillo said he was surprised that despite having mutual friends with his wife, Facebook didn't steer her to the right profile. "Why didn't Facebook say: 'Hey, that's probably not the person you're wanting to add. There's a 'Chris Pirillo' that shares 'n' friends with you over here. Shall we do this for you?'"
Facebook says it shuts down profiles spewing nothing but spam. But the social network's not implementing automated verification when it comes to protecting our profiles. Which means it's up to us to monitor our own accounts. Perhaps in the next iteration of this program this will be addressed. It's a wait and see. And the irony is that this system doesn't protect people's privacy as much as their intellectual property, says Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"It's a way for folks to be clear about the source of a social media account," Jeschke explains. But it's not a cure-all if someone wants to impersonate you. "If you're verified, it doesn't prevent someone from making a fake account about you."
She says accounts that parody well-known personalities, like those on Twitter, are important forms of discourse. "It would be good if this verification policy encourages services to be more tolerant of parody accounts." But with Facebook's real name policy, she says she's not sure if that could even happen.
Zapanta, whose own online life has been disrupted by impersonators, isn't as open or confident that the new system will curtail this behavior.
"​I do hope verification will help, but it's hard to predict," Zapanta laments.
To all those stealing his likeness and identity, Zapanta has a message: "Stop being a creep and create your own compelling online persona. I put genuine effort into my online presence and it's something I pride. It's unfortunate that people are trying to fool others in stealing that."

For readers: how to use iBooks

Do you love to read ebooks on the iPad? Are you a writer who wants to publish his or her own interactive ebooks for the iPad, and sell them on the iBookstore? Zeeshan Chawdhary, a highly experienced web and mobile developer who is currently the CTO of iCityConcierge Ltd, a travel startup, shows you how to do both in his new book Instant Apple iBooks How-to. To read ebooks, you use the app iBooks in your iPad. To write and publish ebooks, you use the app iBooks Author in your Apple MacBook or iMac. The first five sections describe how to use iBooks, and the rest tell you how to use iBooks Author 2.0, the latest version of the program as of this writing. You should also know how to create an HTML5 webpage.

For readers: how to use iBooks

In these sections, you are introduced to features that enable you to browse and purchase ebooks (or download free ebooks), group these ebooks into different categories; or Collections, and add PDFs to the iBooks library. You also learn about tools that you can use while you read these books. These reading tools enable you to select text from the book to be copied, pasted, and emailed. In iBooks 3.0.2, which was current when he wrote this book, you can also change the color of the highlight when the text is selected, and use the Fonts and Themes feature to change the font size and family of the text, and the color of the book's background. If you're using iBooks 3.1, please note that this version no longer has these last two features. The horizontal bar that appears when you select the text has also changed. When you tap the text to select it, only the words "Copy" and "Search" appear in the bar. If you tap one word, the word "Define" - which enables a box with a dictionary definition of this word to appear - will also show up in the bar. To view iBooks - and the rest of your iPad - in "night mode," go to your Settings app, press Accessibility, then switch Invert Colors to On.

For writers: how to use iBooks Author

Here, Instant Apple iBooks How-to teaches you how to create an interactive London travel guidebook by choosing a template (you can find templates in the program itself, or various websites), and editing the text and graphics. In iBooks Author 2.0, you can now directly drag images from websites onto placeholder images. Then you learn how to create a custom HTML5 Twitter widget that pulls tweets about London into the ebook, and a widget where a 3D object can be viewed and rotated in the ebook. When inserting a 3D object into your iBooks Author 2.0 document, make sure "Auto-rotate object when idle" is unchecked; otherwise the 3D object will not show.

Writing

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Writing makes me a better thinker – (understand that better is relative!) In an effort to create content that is succinct, reveals new ways to look at common things, or apply simple solutions to seemingly complex problems, I believe I now think about business much differently.

Writing makes me a better listener – When I engage in conversations or listen to radio interviews, I listen with a writer’s ear and often find my head filling up with ideas for blog posts by simply listening to others discuss sometimes unrelated subjects.

Writing makes me a better salesperson – I write like I speak and often I write to sell an idea or even a very specific tactic. It’s amazing, but I find that clearly stating idea pitches in writing has improved my ability to quickly articulate them in a selling or interview setting. It’s like you build up this reserve bank of pretested discussion points.

Writing makes me a better speaker – This one falls nicely from the previous point, but I’ll also add that working through blog posts on meatier topics, those that readers weigh in on, has produced some of my best presentation material to date.

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Writing keeps me focused on learning – The discipline required to create even somewhat interesting content in the manner I’ve chosen requires that I study lots of what’s hot, what’s new, what’s being said and what’s not being said in order to find ways to apply it to the world of small business.

Writing allows me to create bigger ideas – The habit of producing content over time affords you the opportunity to create larger editorial ideas that can be reshaped and repurposed for other settings. I’ve taken a collection of blog posts on a specific topic and turned them into an ebook more than once.
So, think you don’t have the time or the reason to write? – I hope you think again.

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