It’s about time I shared my secret about how I respond to Facebook messages so quickly. Recently, my friend compared me to a “bot” who spends his entire day lurking around on FB just because of the speed with which I commented on her wall post. I admit that compared to other activities, I spend most of my free time on Facebook, but that time is mostly spent responding to mails, comments and other correspondences; not “lurking around”. 

What allows me to respond so quickly is the nifty Feed-Reader feature built into most modern browsers. I haven’t really explored this option in any browser apart from Opera, but I’ve heard about Firefox and Chrome having a similar feature. Not sure if it’s built-in or available through extensions in other browsers, but I’m pretty happy with Opera. Sure wish they could add the ability to play a sound for new notifications. Currently, sounds are available only for a handful of events. I’ll surely request this in the DesktopTeam’s blog. 

Anyway, so everytime you communicate with me on Facebook and you cause a new notification to be generated (bottom-right corner, next to FB Chat), that notification is delivered to my browser/desktop via an RSS Feed. Clicking on the notification describes what it’s about, and if needed, I log into Facebook to respond to the activity. I get notifications in my browser without having to log into FB. Got it? 

The feed is updated every 5 minutes, so yeah, that’s a lil too frequent.

The following set of screenshots should guide you on how to go about setting Opera up for the Facebook Notifications.

Umm, about these images, I realised a lil too late that my screen resolution was too high. 

Also, use the arrow keys on your keyboard (left/right) to navigate through the images. You can “drag” inside the image to move it.