How to Type Inverted text, Avoid certain people without their knowledge and Much more

1. HOW TO: Have Fun With Facebook’s Humorous Language Options [Typing Invertedly]

While you can always change your setting into more sensible alternative languages, the site offers a couple of fun linguistic Easter eggs.

You can chose to have Facebook display upside down English, or, for anyone feeling a little salty, in “pirate.” Pirate essentially turns your status into your “plank,” your attachments into “loot” and instead of “share” it offers the option to “blabber t’ yer mates.”

Sadly, anything you type in the status bar won’t be upside down, or pirate-y. But with the use of some external sites you can achieve the same effect.

TypeUpsideDown.com and UpsideDownText.com are just two examples of sites that can flip your text, while the Talk Like a Pirate Day site can help you with your pirate translations.

2. HOW TO: Hide Status Updates From Certain People

Using Facebook’s general privacy settings (find these by hitting “account” on the top right of a Facebook page) you can select whether everyone, just friends or friends of friends can see your status updates. However, there is a way to narrow those options down even further.

You can select specific friend lists to see your status (relevant for work, special interest groups, etc.) or even individual people by name, which is useful for anyone organizing a surprise party.

To take advantage of these options, click the padlock icon just below your “what’s on your mind” box on your wall and a drop down menu should appear. Selecting “customize” will bring up more options such as “make this visible to” and “hide from” with the option to make your selection a default.

3. HOW TO: Pre-Schedule Status Updates

While SocialOomph, Sendible and HootSuite offer the same kind of service, the simplest way to schedule Facebook status updates is by using the easy, free Later Bro service.

Just sign in with Facebook Connect, select your time zone, type in what it is you’d like to say, set the calendar and clock to when you’d like to say it, and presto!

4. HOW TO: Tag People in Your Status Updates

This was quite a big deal when it was announced this past September, but from the amount of searches on the topic “how can I make someone’s name go blue in a Facebook status?” it seems it’s not universally known.

To mention someone in a status update just type “@” (a la Twitter) in the status bar and start typing their name as it appears on Facebook. An auto-generated list will then come up with people in your social circle whose name starts with the letters you’ve typed. The feature also works with pages, brands, events and companies.

Hit the name you want, complete the update, click share and the name will become a hyperlink (you won’t see the @ symbol) and will appear in blue text.

5. HOW TO: Turn Your Status Updates Into a Word Cloud

There’s a really fun way to visualize anyone’s status updates (even an entire country’s) as a word cloud. TheStatus Analyzer 3D app will look at what it is you’ve been chatting about lately and generate a list, and then a pretty, colorful, animated cloud as pictured above.

You can share the results with others on the social networking site by posting it to your friends’ walls or by adding it to your profile.

6. Appear Online Only to Selected Friends:
Facebook chat is one of the coolest and most useful features in FB. My dilemma, however, was how to limit the number of people I chat with every time I log in. I certainly can’t accommodate them all but I don’t want them to feel like I’m rejecting them when I don’t send them a reply. I didn’t know back then that it is possible to appear online only to a few selected friends. A friend of mine actually gave me this idea which I’m sure would be of use to you, too.

Here’s how to do it:

Go to Chat found at the lower right side of the page and then, click on Friends List. A small window will appear where you can type and create a new list.  You could name it anything you want. In this example I named it “Blocklist”.

On your newly created list, select and start dragging those names that you wish to block. Then set your status to appear offline to this particular group of friends. With this, you now appear completely invisible to them. Try it now.