Manage Facebook; Don't let Facebook Manage You.

Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself!

Tony Wright gives tips on managing Facebook's latest revamp.

excerpt from Rescue Time

Sure, Facebook knows your personal information. They know where you live. They know where your friends live. They know where your family lives. They know your interests, your goals, your passions, your role-models. However, the true gems sit in the data. It’s more than

likely that Facebook logs additional data about you. Facebook knows how much time you spend on Facebook per day. They know what time of day you log in.

Facebook also knows which profiles you click on most. Through this data, they can capture your hidden desires.

Let’s take a use-case example:

Ashley is an average looking 16 year-old high school

girl. She hangs out with the nerdy crowd. Her interests include reading. Her favorite music is the Jonas Brothers. She’s having trouble getting over that nerd hump–and the fact that she still likes the Jonas Brothers.

Ashley has 246 friends. Not much for a teen her age. Her average time spent on Facebook outweighs others’ at 2 hours/day.Ashley clicks on Stacy’s profile an average of ten times a day. Ashley knows Stacy through friends.

Stacy is a popular girl and hangs with the popular crowd. Stacy has 1,200 friends and her wall is always flooded with funny recollections of the previous day and photos–photo’s in which Ashley constantly browses. In Stacy’s profile, it shows that Stacy loves the band Greenday, and Stacy likes “rocking out.

”Guess what types of ads Ashley (the geeky girl that loves Jonas Brothers) will see? Greenday ads (the band that Stacy, the popular girl, absolutely loves) Facebook

has the potential to carry this out.

This is the truest form of relevant advertising. Facebook

essentially knows what Ashley wants to be through the data Ashley logs in clicking and browsing Stacy’s photos.

Thus, the more you do on Facebook, and the more distracted you are, gives Facebook more data on what type of person you are; thus, allowing them to deliver more relevant ads.

So the question social networks, like Facebook, ask themselves everyday is, “How can we get, (i) more people using Facebook, (ii) more often, and (iii) get them to see our ads more frequently?”

In order to negate these distractions in the face of Facebook’s re-design, I recommend the following steps:

1. Use RescueTime to set up alerts. These alerts will help you identify and keep track of the time spent of Facebook.
2. Get used to the red notification buttons, and feel comfortable in keeping them unread.
3. Before you login to Facebook write down your objective in logging in; otherwise you’ll forget when you’re hit with thousands of social stimuli (friend requests, pokes, wall posts, etc.) For example, “Logging in to wish my cousin a happy birthday.”
4. Turn off all email alerts–anything “Facebook” should not appear in your email inbox
5. Go into invisible mode on Facebook Chat
6. Categorize your news feeds into groups–those that are your close friends, work friends, family, and randoms ( I mean random people that you felt awkward in declining their friend request. This will help you not get distracted with photos posted by randoms, as they won’t appear in your priority groups.)
7. Last, LifeHacker put together a great resource of Facebook Apps that help you get more productive
8. Also, don’t forget about Facebook lite: http://lite.facebook.com

Thanks to Tony Wright and the Rescue Time blog.

Check there for heaps of other time management tips and software that might suit you.