BE INVISIBLE IN FACEBOOK

As you might be aware of, Facebook offers a variety of communication options to its users. You can send someone a message, write on their wall or chat with them. You can access chat via the chat interface in the lower right corner.

Once you are online, you can view which of your friends are online and they will be able to see you online as well. Generally, Facebook only provides the options to go offline or online. Apart from this, the only other status available is ‘Idle’ which appears next to your name after a prolonged period of inactivity.

But how can you be invisible on Facebook to certain users? This is how.

You can also create lists to group your friends in Facebook. The lists appear in the chat interface as well. In addition, you can also create new lists to group your friends from the chat window. This is the functionality that we would be using to appear offline. For completeness, here is how you create a list from the chat interface.

• Click on the Friend Lists label in the chat window. A dialog will pop up asking you for list name.
  
• Key in a name for the list and hit Enter. This will create a list in your chat window.
• When the list is empty, Facebook displays a message letting you know that you can drag and drop friends’ names to make them a part of the list. Go ahead, choose the ones that you want to put in a list and they will be added.
  
• Lists, as you might expect, are persistent; meaning that they will be there just as you left them the last time you logged out of Facebook. You can create as many lists as you want to group your friends; and as I will show you, to appear offline to them.

For this purpose, we need at least one list in your chat window. Follow the steps detailed above to create a list, you can name your list anything that you want. I have named one of my lists as "invisible". As soon as the list is created, you will notice a "toggle button" next to the list name in your chat window.

This button lets you appear online or offline to a list of friends depending upon its state. Coupled with the fact that you can easily drag and drop contacts in and out of a list, this is a good trick to appear online to a select list of friends and appear offline to others. Just drag the contacts you want to appear offline to into the "invisible" list and then click on the toggle button/switch next to "invisible" so that it switches to gray. You will now appear offline to contacts in the "invisible" list, while everyone else can see you online.

also there is  a  Facebook application where we can check out our online friends while we are offline

click here to check our application