Yostivanich

Face­book this morn­ing released a sys­tem of new pri­vacy con­trols for user pro­files. These con­trols allow you to cre­ate groups or lists of friends. You can then apply very spe­cific pri­vacy rules to each of these lists or even one par­tic­u­lar friend.

This is a huge step for­ward in my opin­ion and one that I have been wait­ing for Face­book to take. The sim­ple rea­son is that as open and pub­lic as I make my life some things don’t always need to be broad­cast to every­body on the planet. Easy exam­ple, does my boss need to know what music I lis­ten to or what my reli­gious or even sex­ual pref­er­ence is? Depend­ing on how com­fort­able I am with my boss and co-workers I may not want them know­ing that sort of infor­ma­tion. Thus all I have to do is place those co-workers into a group, call it “Busi­ness”, and set up pri­vacy con­trols for that group.

Okay, so what hap­pens when a co-worker becomes a closer friend, well you can place one per­son into mul­ti­ple groups. This per­son then has the most lenient pri­vacy con­trols directed at them accord­ing to their group plac­ing. That sounds really com­plex but it actu­ally isn’t. I have a friend John, John started out in the “Busi­ness” group, but we have hung out sev­eral times and I would con­sider him now a close friend, so I place John in my “Close Friends” group. John will be able to see what­ever a “Busi­ness” and a “Close Friend” can see.

The groups also allow you to mes­sage that whole group all at once. So for instance you want to tell all your close friends, that you have a new phone num­ber. Mes­sage all mem­bers of “Close Friends” and bam, every­one knows you changed your phone num­ber. This is much sim­pler than just about every other per­sonal e-mail sys­tem on the planet in terms of this sort of mass e-mail. No hav­ing to remem­ber who exactly you want to con­tact just select the group of peo­ple who you do wish to con­tact and write the message.

Pri­vacy is still the real killer of social net­works, the cool­ness fac­tor of being involved in some­thing spe­cial isn’t as impor­tant as the abil­ity to present an image that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. When that abil­ity goes away and your sup­posed pri­vate image dis­played online becomes some­thing that the gen­eral pub­lic can access, peo­ple leave. As pub­lic as I make my life I make sure that every­thing that goes online that I post or my friends post about me is some­thing that I would be com­fort­able claim­ing as my own. There are many things that I don’t talk about online because I don’t feel com­fort­able with the rest of the world talk­ing about it. That is one rea­son why this blog tries to be more intel­lec­tual as opposed to per­sonal. This one change eas­ily makes Face­book some­thing that I now feel com­fort­able hav­ing all of my con­tacts listed inside of Facebook.

I am really excited about this change, and I hope it means that Face­book will actu­ally be here to stay for some time.