Facebook online friends when you’re offline

September 9, 2008 | Posted by: Rafa | Filed In: (Anti)Social networking, Tips

Admittedly, this has little to do with Rat Radio, the Key, Miami, or anything else, but I figured this is something that most readers of this site would appreciate, considering so many use Facebook (so many, in fact, that they all stopped reading this). I also wanted to tell people because I thought it was interesting.

This little trick will let you log out of the Facebook chat while still being able to see who is online. Sometimes you just want to see if someone you want to talk to is there, but you don’t want to be available to everyone. Or maybe, as I suppose will be more common, you can see who is wasting time on Facebook without them seeing you. That said, now that I’m revealing this I suppose more people will be offline more often.

First thing: you’re going to need to be using Firefox (the web browser). If you don’t use it, tough luck. That said, you can get Firefox here.

Once you have Firefox, you’ll need to install the Greasemonkey add-on. Greasemonkey is a little add-on that basically lets you change websites only for yourself. While browsing with Firefox, go here and hit “add to Firefox”. This is all done seamlessly and should be pretty painless. When you’re done with that restart Firefox.

Now finally, go to this last page and hit “install script” in the top right corner. It will ask you if you want to install the script to Greasemonkey, to which you should click ‘install’.

Now browse over to your Facebook and you should see the results. If you use the old Facebook it’ll have a variety of ways to display your online friends. With the new Facebook it only shows on the bottom right. Log out of chat and you can still see who is online.

If you want to turn it off completely, just click the little monkey face down in the corner. If you go online, click the little x next to the fake online friends menu to see your real online friends menu.

Now that you have Greasemonkey you can customize even more aspects. Check out this other one: inYOf4ceBook. This will let you see large size pictures just by hovering over the thumbnails. You can find all types of Greasemonkey scripts at Userscripts.org; just search for the name of the website.