Facebook and my rant

I've been using Facebook for 6 months. There are two irritating issues that I met every time I use it.

One - I have little control of how my posts reach my audience. I have friends, co-workers, relatives, and direct family members all on Facebook. Whenever I want to post something I have to be very careful about what I'm gonna say. Because after you post it, every friend (in Facebook all contacts are considered to be friends) will see it. It isn't that I will say something offensive. Sometimes I just want to target a smaller group of audience. Won't it be nice to have something similar to Email's contact groups? Organize your contacts into different groups, e.g. co-workers and families. When you post, you can choose which groups to target. This introduced a lot of flexibility and also removed some unnecessary privacy confusions. This issue is about sending posts. My 2nd issue is about receiving posts.

I 'Liked' WSJ and since then I started to receive posts from that channel. The posts are actually interesting. The problem is it's just too many of them, and they started to polluting my news feed page. I didn't find an obvious way to manage these posts. Maybe I should look further. But won't it be great to have a simple filter mechanism? Users can define filters that automatically route posts from specific sources to user's predefined 'folders'. Like 'rules' in Outlook or 'smart filters' in Gmail.

The core of Facebook is graphs of nodes which communicate to each other. How to make the communication more effective and intuitive should be Facebook's highest priority to concern. Don't you think?

Adobe reader: Remember last read page

I've been using Amazon Kindle lately. It's such an adorable tool for e-book reading. The most useful feature that I can't live without is synchronizing the last read page across all Kindle clients. I have Kindle clients installed on my Kindle 3G Wireless, Windows, Macbook Pro, and of course my beloved Android phone. And whenever I open whichever Kindle client, it will sync to the page I was reading. Convenient and time saving!

However, not every e-book is in kindle format. Actually most of digital documents are PDFs.

Lately, I am reading an e-book that has 1200 pages! A e-door-stopper. It is in PDF format.

I have to turn off my PC every night, otherwise it will intermittently make high-pitch beeps like a hot smoke detector. My Adobe Reader 9 doesn't have a bookmarking feature. So whenever I open the 1200-page PDF, I have to recall where I was, and click through the "Table of Contents" jungle to resume what I left. (Some PDFs even don't have a Table of Contents! Why author, why?!)

Although this little search 'task' doesn't sound difficult, it annoys me every time. It annoys me so much that today I jumped out my chair and finally decided to end my suffering. I Googled. The keyword is "Adobe reader bookmark". It turns out I've been such a fool for so many years.

The solution is so easy, and yet I haven't found or bothered to find it until today. You don't need to install any addon for Adobe Reader, which I thought would be the case. Just go to "Edit" menu, and choose "Preferences". In the dialog box, select the "Documents" category. Now check the "Restore last view settings when reopening documents" option. Done.

Like what the option is described, it makes Adobe Reader jump to the location where you left last time. Of course, unlike Kindle clients, it won't sync PDF copies on different PCs. But this little feature is good enough for me. I don't have to remember the last page nor I have to click through the Table of Contents. The continuous reading experience feels so good :)