How do you deal with a Facebook addiction? The first step is to recognize that you have a problem. There’s a very simple way to check how much time you spend on the social network, using a program called Facebook Runner. Then you can decide whether or not you have an addiction that needs to be addressed.
Facebook Runner is a browser extension that monitors your Facebook activity whenever you’re on the site, telling you exactly how long you’re on it. Facebook Runner can be set to appear under your name on the home screen and logs different information about your Facebook usage.
How Facebook Runner works
Facebook Runner is available as an extension for Google Chrome (used in this example), Firefox, Opera and Safari. To install it, you just need to visit the download page, choose the version for your browser, and add it.
Once added a button with the Facebook Runner logo will appear in your browser’s menu bar, from where you can access the extension.
If you left-click on the button you’ll see the time you’ve been logged into Facebook since you installed Facebook Runner.
If you right-click on the button you’ll access Facebook Runner’s options menu.
Facebook Runner options
The options menu in Facebook Runner consists of three tabs:
Settings
From this tab you can configure the following:
- Time format: short (10m 15s) or long (10 minutes 15 seconds)
- Integrate timer on Facebook: if you choose ‘yes’, timings from Facebook Runner will appear under your name on Facebook.
- Update interval: choose whether to update the timing information ever 5, 10, 30 or 45 seconds.
- Reset timers: program when to reset the counter on Facebook Runner
- Restart timers manually
Details
The Details tab allows you to consult statistics of your Facebook usage based on data measured by Facebook Runner.
You can see the following:
- When the timer was started
- Next reset
- Average time spent on Facebook per day
- Average time spent on the Internet per day
- Facebook/Internet time percentage
About
The About tab tells you more about the extension and its author