Here’s a simple tip that I came up with myself the other day: hide your online status on Facebook! How is this useful? Well, now that Facebook has built chat into an online interface (like Google Hangouts inside Gmail), your friends can start chatting with you anytime you log into Facebook.
Personally, I never wanted to use Facebook.com as an instant messenger, but instead used Facebook Messenger for this purpose. Fortunately, Facebook has made it easy to change your online status so people can’t see you are online. In fact, over the past year, they’ve added a few options for you to control in more granularity.
Turn off Facebook Chat
The easiest way to not be bothered by anyone is to simply disconnect by turning off chat completely.
Obviously, if you completely disconnect from the network, no one can see that you are online, but you also cannot see which of your friends are online. This is not like the Invisibility feature in Yahoo Messenger. Check out my previous post on how to tell if someone is invisible on Yahoo.
Here’s how to quickly log out and hide your online status:
Step 1. Log in to your Facebook account
Step 2. Click on the gear icon in the lower right corner of your browser screen and you will see a list of some of the options. One of the options is Disable chat.
When you click on this option, you will see another popup with three options. Before, you had no other option and Facebook just turned off chat for all friends. Now you can selectively choose who you want to hide from, which is great.
You can select Disable chat for all friends except or Disable chat for some friends only. When you turn off chat for everyone or a group of people, they can still send you messages, but the messages will go to your inbox and won’t appear in the chat area or Facebook Messenger.
Note that you can also turn off Facebook Messenger chat, but the app only allows you to turn it off completely. There is currently no way to choose who you want to hide from.
I’ve written several other articles for beginners about Facebook, including how to upload and tag images to Facebook, and how to update Facebook from your mobile phone Enjoy!
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