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February 19, 2009 / Filed under: Facebook, Usability

Facebook has become my "social network of choice" lately, but I must admit some features and settings pages are difficult to find.

There are many tasks I do repeatedly while using Facebook, and would help if there was better visibility/access to these sections:

• Adjust SMS status notifications
• Obtaining your public URI
• RSS feeds

If you have other commonly accessed pages of Facebook that you'd like better visibility to, please share in the comments.

Adjust SMS status notifications

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Try as you might, you won't find a convenient link that takes you to the page where you can adjust which individual status updates get sent to you as SMS:

This is a pretty common thing, as I basically live off SMS, and use it to interact while away from a computer.

Perhaps you're thinking Settings > Mobile would contain a link to this page? Nope, that section only refers to activating your mobile phone and browsing the Facebook mobile site from your phone:

How about Settings > Notifications? Not there either - that's just email notifications.

I dug around for weeks until I finally stumbled upon the friendly URL: facebook.com/mobile. It's friendly alright, as long as you already knew what it was! As far as I can tell, it's not linked to from anywhere obvious.

Obtaining your public Facebook URI

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I'm on Facebook, and I'd like people to know it. Trouble is, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to link people to my Facebook profile. Turns out, there is - but you have to accept some loss of privacy first.

While viewing your profile page, look in the left column, towards the bottom. You should see a link titled, Create a Profile Badge:

This will take you to a page that lets you create an HTML "badge" for displaying on an external website. Within this HTML is a nice, clean link to your Facebook profile:

Copy and paste this link out of there, and feel free to use it anywhere. It's still pretty long, so one quick way to shorten it is to remove the "www" portion. If only there was a way to remove that random number at the very end, but without it, the URL won't resolve. This seems like the best we're gonna do:

http://facebook.com/people/Matt-Thommes/711582259

You may notice that when visitors first visit this URL, it shows a Facebook 404 page:

This is because you haven't set your profile to be public yet. To do so, visit this same URL in a browser where you are already logged in to your Facebook account. You'll notice the URL resolves now, and has a little blurb about your search listing privacy:

Click "Edit search privacy settings." You'll be taken to your Search Privacy settings page. Towards the bottom you'll see an option to create a public search listing for your profile:

This will allow non-Facebook users (and/or Facebook users not logged in) to see a basic public profile page for you:

Now, why they can't make this a more obvious setting, I am not sure.

RSS feeds

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Facebook doesn't seem to want you to leave their site. RSS feed indicators are pretty well-hidden. In fact, when you eventually find one, it won't even be the typical orange color - it'll be muted blue as to blend in with the rest of the Facebook site:

This one is found under "Friends" section, along the left-side.

If you're looking for more advanced RSS feeds for other areas of Facebook content, I'm sorry to say this is the only feed I could find.