Hack This: Into the World of Non-Creepy Facebook Hacks

Hack This is Motherboard’s weekly guide to doing technology better.

The lower-internet was abuzz over the weekend about Oli pranking his mate James on Facebook—basically, downloading pictures of James, making minor alterations, and reposting them. Presumably, it was a non-hack and Oli was just upping them to his own profile and tagging them, but maybe he was getting into James account and straight-up replacing them. Hopefully not: that’d make the prank actually a bit malicious and not-so-funny. In any case, it’s worth a click above.

And, yes, you can actually get fairly creepy with Facebook hacks. Just searching “Facebook hack” brings up two main results: looking at private profiles, and looking at private pictures. I suppose this is the risk of living in a world that is about 70-percent creeps. But, there’s also a big pile of “hacks” or just crafty add-ons for Facebook that aren’t actually creepy or stalkery.

A few favorites:

Unfriender

Not really. This was a 3rd party Facebook app that may or may not have actually even worked before it got deleted by the company. What it did was tell you when you got defriended. Seems pretty handy, but I can see why Facebook would nix it if it’s still keeping a “dislike” button from us. It’s shot down a couple successor apps too.

Also, there’s a privacy issue that an “unfriender” type app raises. Simply, I want to be able to unfriend someone on the internet without being concerned about retribution from that person. There’s quite a few reasons I might defriend you, and many of those fit nicely under the “I want nothing to do with you whatsoever stay the fuck away from me” umbrella. As much as I might like to have access to a defriender, I don’t want you to have it.

Anyhow, your thoughts?

fbCal

Yes. Finally. One of Facebook’s weakest and strongest things is the calendar. Basically, I can find everything going on around me in my social, professional, and professionally social circles with Facebook, but there’s no good way to keep track of/organize it.

Grab this app, and in like three steps—“allow,” select type of calendar, and select which events (attending, maybe, etc.)—you’ve exported your Facebook events into a Google (or Outlook or iCal) calendar. Neat. Now only if we could get a calendar app that would scrub all of your friend’s events and invites and toss ’em in there. That would be impressive.

FlipText

Maybe you too like being really irritating. Use this to flip all of your text upside down.

Sendible

Pretty simple: Give Sendible your Facebook login and you can set up timed status updates, like “I’m not here right now” every five minutes, or “If I’m not home by now, send help,” or “I did it for love.” It also does a lot of less macabre and more businessy type stuff too.

Cleaner

This is a Greasemonkey script—a local Firefox add-on—that strips out a lot of Facebook’s ad content. Truth is that I’m not on Facebook enough to be all that bothered by its ads, but I can halfway justify just doing it out of principle.

There’s a ton more of these scripts listed here and, because the scripts are local to your computer, many if not most are pretty superficial. But have some fun exploring.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.