buzzbishop
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Facebook unveiled a series of new features today focussed on privacy.
Facebook has survived on what is called user generated content. Zuckerberg and friends created the framework of Facebook, but you and me are the ones doing the heavy lifting, populating the site with content that makes it relevant. We are the worker bees doing it all for free.
Think about it. We're writing the stories, tagging the pictures, shooting the video and sharing the links that makes Facebook popular.
It's like owning a storage locked company. They built the storage lockers, but it's the stuff that's inside those lockers that gives the company value. Finally we have a way to pull all the content we put in to Facebook out of Facebook.
There will be a simple Download Your Information button that will instantly dump everything you've put up on Facebook on your desktop in one tidy zipped file. Easy.
A social dashboard will also be created to let you follow the breadcrumb trail you've left on the net via Facebook Connect. That's the service that shares your information with assorted websites and lets you to easily register for their content. This dashboard will give you a quick glimpse of what you're sharing and with whom and allow you to massage those permissions.
Facebook has also created a way to reclassify your friends list.
Remember when you would have fights with people who could be in your "Top 8" on MySpace? Facebook didn't have any of those issues, our friends were never really sortable - but now, as we all accept friend requests from random bar strangers, companies, colleagues, contacts in addition to people we actually now, there is a way to better sort your stream.
"We talk about this internally as the biggest problem in social networking," Zuckerberg began, when introducing today's third announcement. The CEO was referring to friend groups, a way of classifying your friends in levels of closeness -- such as, say, your friends from work, or home, or college.
"If someone is in your family, or is your girlfriend, or you interact with them a lot, you probably care more about everything that they post, whereas if there is somebody that you haven't talked with in a year, maybe you care if they have a baby or get married, but you probably don't want to see what they eat for breakfast," he said.
[source]
A colleague, Tod Maffin, has a great explanation on how to create friend lists on Facbeook so you can sort your stream, but Zuck said today that, at most 5% of us were using the feature. So they're trying to make it easier to separate the signal from noise.
Facebook will use the social web to predict who you're most likely to want updates on. People you tag in photos, people who's wall you post on etc. These common relationships will be used to populate your groups, and then can be fine tuned and massaged by each user in the group.
In other words, it's an automated BFF finder.
Mashable calls these groups "the new Facebook." The privacy settings are drilled down to closed, secret and open. Closed groups allow people to see members, but not content. Open groups are fully visible while secret groups are fully locked.
The new features are live and are rolling out across the social network.
What do you think of the Facebook announcements today? Are you drowing in a sea of irrelevant updates and a bloated list of 'friends?'
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