by Melanie Cossey

Created on: August 11, 2010

Social networking sites such as Facebook are great when you want to connect with friends without leaving your home. Facebook's chat feature, while quite basic compared to other messenger services, is still a good way for people on your friends list to connect with you in real time. However, there are times when you want to visit Facebook while staying relatively incognito. Perhaps you just want to check your email, or double check the time on an invitation you received to a party, or you want to play a game without interruption. At such times, it would be handy to stop anyone from seeing you are online; if only you could figure out how to do this, in the midst of Facebook's ever changing tools.

 This is actually one of the simpler things to find and take care of on Facebook.

 First, log in to your account. You will find the log in button at the upper right hand side of the main Facebook page. After you have logged in, you will be directed to the main page, where you can see status updates of your friends down the middle and your bookmarks and a list of friends currently online, down the left side.

 If you look to your bottom right hand side, you will notice a small box marked “chat” with a number beside it in brackets. This indicates how many of your friends are online. If you click on this box, it will expand to show you exactly who is online, which is in addition to the box on the left of the screen. It may seem redundant, but this is where you must go if you want to access the option of appearing offline for privacy.

 After expanding the chat box, you will see directly below the blue band marked “chat” two similar boxes, one marked “Friend Lists” and the other marked “Options.” Click on the one marked “Options.”

Once inside options, a drop down menu will appear. Unfortunately sometimes this menu is mostly obscured by your friends list. If this happens, you should be able to hit on “pop out chat.” which is the second option down on the drop down menu, in case you have trouble making this out. This will create a larger friend's list in another window, making it much easier to see the options listed.

 So returning to the options list; the first option at the top of the list is “”go offline.” If you click on this box, immediately your name will drop off your friend's “online” list and you will appear for all intents and purposes, offline and no one will be able to text chat with you. As I mentioned before, Facebook chat is quite basic and unfortunately at this time there is no option for appearing offline to only one friend you wish to avoid and online to all the others. If you choose to go hide, you are blocking access to all your friends indiscriminately, so be aware of that.

 To return to an online status, just click on the chat box again and immediately it will reconnect you. This is all you need to do to gain some quiet time on Facebook if you don't feel like chatting with friends. Social Networking becomes more enjoyable when you take the time to learn how to make it work for you. Time is limited so make the most out of what time you have. Learning to use Facebook's tools is a great way to make your time work for you, not against you.

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