Add Symbols to Your Facebook Updates

Ever wonder how your Facebook friends add those smiley faces, hearts, musical notes, and other cute little icons to their status updates? It's easier than you might think. Here's how:

1. Turn on your keyboard's Number Lock.

2. Hold down the Alt key, then type one of the numbers listed below on the numeric keypad. (You must use the keypad; the standard number keys won't work.) So, for example, to get a heart symbol, you'd press 

Alt-3. For a musical note, Alt-1-3 (meaning you hold down Alt, press 1, press 3, and then release the Alt key).

Here's a list of some of the more popular symbols you might want to use:

Alt-1 Happy face
Alt-2 Sad face
Alt-3 Heart
Alt-13 Single musical note
Alt-14 Double musical note
Alt-15 Sun
Alt-0169 Copyright symbol
Alt-0188 1/4 symbol
Alt-0189 1/2 symbol

If you're a laptop user and your keyboard doesn't have a numeric keypad, your best bet is to copy your desired symbol from another source, like Facebook Emoticons. Just bookmark the page and pull it up in another tab as needed.
Have fun!

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Customize Who Can See Your Facebook Status Updates

Facebook status updates don't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. You can decide who gets to see a particular update--or, if you prefer, who doesn't.

For example, suppose you were invited to a neighbor's Super Bowl party over the weekend, and you want to post an "awesome party!" status update. However, you're FB friends with some other neighbors who weren't invited, and you don't want them to feel bad. Ideally, you'd hide your update from that handful of friends, but allow everyone else to see it.

On the flip side, suppose you're planning a winter-camping outing with a group of buddies. You want to share a status update ("I bought the beans! Who's bringing the beer?"), but only with them.

Facebook makes this kind of selective status-updating easier than you might think. Here's how:

1. Enter your status update, then click the little padlock icon next to the Share button.

2. Choose Customize.

3. If you want your update to be visible only to select friends, click the menu next to These people and choose Specific People. Then, enter the names of the FB friends you want to include.

4. If you want to block your update from specific people, type their names in the Hide this from field.

5. Click Save Setting, then click Share to publish your customized update.

It's too bad Facebook doesn't give you a selector for choosing the people you want to include/exclude, or let you set up "status-update groups." Still, at least you have the option of being more, well, selective about who sees which updates

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Worried About Kids on Facebook? Meet ZoneAlarm SocialGuard

Keeping your children safe on social networks like Facebook is a challenge, especially if you want them to have any semblance of privacy. But Check Point's new ZoneAlarm SocialGuard ($20, seven-day free trial) can help: It offers an easy way to guard against potential threats while still allowing your children the freedom to explore Facebook's offerings.

 

ZoneAlarm's SocialGuard makes it easy to identify which Facebook users may pose a threat to your child.SocialGuard can be used to monitor up to five Facebook accounts. You'll need the username and password for each account that you'd like to monitor, so it's not a covert spying tool. The Facebook users also receive a message that their account is being protected, but that message is only visible to them--their friends cannot see it. SocialGuard does not block or hide content on the user's page.

Once installed, SocialGuard scans the linked Facebook accounts, looking for potential strangers, possible cyberbullying, malicious links, and hacked accounts. The neatly-organized interface makes potential threats easy to identify. Potential cyberbullies are identified based on the language they use when sending both public and private messages to your child. ZoneAlarm automatically flags some curse words--which is only a partial solution--but you can customize the list to your liking. You also can tell the app to ignore the first occurrence of a word, so that you're only alerted if it appears multiple times.

SocialGuard also identifies potential strangers, using criteria such as a lack of any common friends, as well as Facebook users with questionable activities, such as adults who friend many children, or those who may be trying to pose as children but are, in fact, adults. In the case of my own Facebook friends, it correctly identified my friends without a stated age as adults.

You can choose to have SocialGuard send alerts to you via e-mail, or you can monitor the account only by logging into the app itself. You also can determine which words you'd like SocialGuard to be on the lookout for.

SocialGuard certainly isn't perfect. In my tests, it identified several actual friends as potential strangers simply because we didn't have any friends in common--a situation not unusual for an adult and a journalist, but potentially dangerous for a young child. It also flagged one harmless link as malicious, seemingly because the site it pointed to was still under construction.

But when it comes to protecting your children online, it's better to err on the side of caution. And this easy-to-use app offers parents a great starting point for talking to their children about social network security.

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