A simple “how-to” for you today, on a more personal Facebook kind of tip.

How to: block that annoying old friend who keeps inviting you to events.

We’ve all got one, a well intentioned… but borderline spammer, old friend. Perhaps it’s their new designer bling clothes peg business or they’re in a band, you’ve tried to say “please stop spamming me” but they don’t listen.

Removing them isn’t an option because you do still want to keep in touch with them.

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. On the “account” drop down (top right) choose “privacy settings”
3. You’ll then see a grid of privacy settings, underneath this are 3 sections, underneath the “Block Lists” heading click on “edit your lists”
4. This page has some really handy little bits on it for (un)blocking applications, people and the third section from the top: Block event invitations
5. Type in here the names of any people you want to prevent sending you Facebook event invites.

If you found this useful, please do share it on.

The trend for pointless Facebook pages continues, with lots of “million people who love custard” or statements as pages “Sitting in the bath” – they grow very well virally and rapidly, but what’s the point?

Well…. I’ve noticed a new trend on Facebook recently – a lot of groups, aiming to build a million+ users, follow a formula generally as follows:

1. Create a largely pointless page as above, the more controversial/amusing/”so true” the better.
2. Seed the group to your circle and watch it grow virally (hopefully).
3. Once large enough, add favourite pages for the actual business/person that they were hoping to promote and update to all the fans – sometimes related, usually not.

If 1% of 1,000,000 fans checked out the real target, you’ve just created a huge amount of traffic to try and convert.

It’s clever, but not necessarily very ethical – I guess it’s the Facebook “bait n switch”. Maybe I should of called it “grey hat” (a term stolen from SEO) as it’s not really specifically against the Facebook TOS?

Listed below are 5 links I think all businesses that use Facebook need, some of them are easy to find, some seem to move around and hide:

1) Set friendly URLs (pagenames), ie: facebook.com/yourname – facebook.com/username – Works for personal profiles and pages (once you have 25+ fans).

2) Widgets, fanboxes  and other cross site badges are all on the widgets page.

3) Link twitter accounts to pages or personal accounts facebook.com/twitter – also use this page to change the way your updates are linked and what kind of items are shared.

4) Set up your adverts at facebook.com/advertising – alos handy to see how large a given demographic is, try stepping throughmaking an advert up to the advert target seletion – it will tell you the number of users you could target.

5) Its also very handy to be a “Fan” of Facebook pages (or subscribe to the RSS feed) so you see any updates or new features when they’re announced.

One for my fellow geeks: If you’re thinking of customising the look and feel of your page, or would like to build your own applications, you’ll need the developer resources page for all things FBML.

Handy tip for mobile users: If you use the touch.facebook.com site, choosing friends and then pages gives you quick access to send out updates to your pages – any you are admin for will appear at the top of the list. On m.facebook.com (older non-touch-screen phones) this still works except pages you admin are not listed first… I don’t know why, they just aren’t!

If you find these links/hints helpful, please take 2 seconds to bookmark it somewhere (I use delicious) or share it on with someone else via email, twitter or courier pigeon.

Change #1

LinkedIn is changing its homepage quite a bit – there’s a good write up on Mashable – it’s not live for all users yet, so if you don’t see it, you will soon.

Really though, this post is more about….

Change #2

Since August, I’ve been delivering most of my training under the joint venture I set up with Web Matters (as Web Matters Training) – it’s worked very well for both of us and I’m proud to say we’ve now partnered up with 2e2 to provide a range of Social Media for Business Courses (launching in Feb ’09) based at their London (Victoria) training facility.

In line with this, I felt I should add “Trainer at Web Matters” to my LinkedIn profile, as the 2e2 venture is a partnership with WMT and it would make it clearer for anyone looking at my details via that site.

I’ll post again once the course details are live. Its a great opportunity and if it goes well, we’ll be looking to expand to their other centres around the UK – exciting times.

started charging to sign up?

Part of the value in Twitter for a user is the ability to communicate with a wider circle of influence than you might otherwise of been able, as the masses join twitter the danger is that the noise to signal ratio increases making it less useful – but what if they’d started charging when they hit a certain number of users?

Would it start to make some real money that so far it has only hinted at being able to earn? Would people of left the service for another? Certainly charging existing users, would create a mass exodus… but some of the attraction for early adopters is the exclusive club feel – that would be, in some ways, amplified.

This is a very hypothetical post btw – it came from being asked why twitter was anything more than “the next big thing” – in their words, “it was all about friends reunited, then myspace, then facebook… now everyones joining twitter – its just another fad, I’m not signing up”.

That conversation led me to the thought above and also to wonder, what’s the next big thing?

What if twitter IS just a fad?

Some people lose a lot of money, the cool kids move on, the spammers and randomness takes over – this is based on what some people would perceive happened to myspace as a platform, although I would argue its reverted back to its “native” state of being a good place for bands/musicians/DJs/performers.

So what do you think?

Is it a fad?

If so, what’s next?