I want to trick my brother into thinking I’m on a business trip down to Mexico even though I’m staying home. Can I do that on Facebook?
Facebook is like a palette of paints ready for action; there’s not much you can’t do when you’re on Facebook if you’re enthusiastic enough. You can most assuredly make it look exactly like you’re in some far-flung locale though it’s a bit trickier showing something just to one person versus everyone that you’re friends with or the public at large.
To start out, I’d recommend you pick a specific city or location in Mexico and check the timezone versus your own, so you don’t confuse people and give your brother reason to doubt the veracity of what you’re posting. Also hop over to Google Images and grab some photos from the location – but I’ll get back to that in a minute or two – and if you really want to be an overachiever, Photoshop yourself into some pictures! That’s not easy to do well, however, so it might be above and beyond.
To start, I’ll post a status update on Facebook that makes it look like I am at the White House in Washington DC. Let’s start by grabbing an image of the White House from Google Image Search:
Though the odds of the image being discovered by the owner is very low if you’re going to post so that only your brother can see it, it’s still reasonable to be at least roughly aware of copyright. A good choice is a photo from any government site – like the White House site itself – because they’re all in the public domain. Find one you like and save it to your desktop.
Now we can head over to Facebook itself to start composing the status update. Lots of options as Facebook moves ever closer to MySpace territory:
See the “Check In” option on the lower left. That’s critical to our deception. Click on it.
By default it shows your current location and previous locations both:
The secret here is that you can type in anything you want to find locations! Let’s try it with “eiffel”:
Hey, you can check in at the Eiffel Tower (more properly Tour Eiffel) easily enough! But I want to be at the White House, so I’ll type that in as an alternative search. You can, of course, specify a town in Mexico:
Did you know there was a separate check-in for Obama’s White House? Didn’t know he had purchased the place! I’ll click on the #1 match as that’s the official White House Facebook Check In Spot.
Next up, I’ll specify a Feeling/Activity that’s thematically relevant: Patriotic!
Last step once you’ve specified that: Click on “Public” on the status update box to bring up this set of choices:
You want to choose “More…” so you can specify just your brother!
Choose this option – Specific friends – and then choose your brother. Now the bottom of the status update window will look like this:
My post I’m going to share with everyone by leaving the choice as “Public” but you might want to just have your brother see your fake status update. Then again, he’d see that it wasn’t a public post so he might be a bit suspicious! Here’s what I ended up with:
As you can see, people buy basically whatever you post, and I’ve already garnered nine likes, nine people who seem to believe that I was indeed in Washington DC at the White House. Hope your efforts are as successful!