How I Keep Track of Facebook Without Visiting Facebook

I can’t stand Facebook. It’s not really anything they did. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t really like going there. It wasn’t as bad before the site redesign, but they managed to do exactly what was necessary to make the interface more annoying and confusing. The redesign does have some redeeming qualities, but mostly it makes my head hurt.

My friends over on FriendFeed actually got me interested in using Facebook again. Not that they all love it or anything, but some of them do use it. After adding them as friends, I found I was actually getting comments on my status messages, people were throwing sheep at me, and I felt kinda bad that I wasn’t engaging them there.

Via SMS

I use a combination of methods for tracking what’s going on with my FB friends when I’m not there. The first method is via my mobile phone. I don’t have the web or a camera, but I do have text messaging. I went to my Account Settings->Mobile and activated Facebook Mobile. The default settings seem to work just fine.

Via IM

This part was a little trickier, but only because I had no clue how to do it at first. The solution was Notify.Me and I would have liked to link to the article where I read about it, but my ADD has since pushed that out of my mind for newer and shinier things. Notify.Me is definitely the primary method I use for keeping up…with Facebook.

Once you have signed up for Notify.Me, visit this tutorial on their Wiki. It details how to follow your Notifications and Friends’ Status updates. Depending on your friends, you may not want the status updates feed. It could possibly get annoying.

Via Email

Facebook recently lost everyone’s email notification settings. I think they did it on purpose to mess with us, but I can’t prove it. I don’t really use email to track things like Facebook because I don’t live in my email like some people do. I want my Facebook interactions to be immediate and not rely on me checking anything. Some people may find this option useful, though. You can configure this in Account Settings->Notifications.

You can also have Notify.Me send you email alerts if you prefer these over IM alerts.

Conclusion

This is just how I do it and, while I hope this setup works for you out of the box, keep in mind that you have a lot of options here. Play around with what feeds you track and which notification methods you use. If you do decide to tweak things or know of a way to improve this, leave a comment. I’d be interested in hearing about it.