Facebook will begin encouraging users to make more of their personal information public to everyone on the web, a shift that moves the company into more direct competition with micro-messaging service Twitter. On Wednesday, the company held a conference call to discuss new changes to privacy controls on the site, and said that in the coming weeks Facebook would ask each of its 225m members to reset their privacy settings. As part of the change, Facebook will trial different transitions tools. Some of these will offer a recommended batch of settings, which will make much more information viewable to anyone on the web than what is currently made public by default.The recommended setting will make public a user’s profile picture album, hometown and current city, bio, work and education information, and all the content a user publishes in their “stream”.This last point is key, as recent changes to Facebook’s design have encouraged users to publish more status updates. Making these updates public will in effect mimic much of Twitter’s functionality.Users will also be given granular privacy settings on each piece of information and content. But for users who choose the recommended setting, they will have to explicitly choose to make each piece of content private. This was reported by the Financial Times today .
Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer who is also running for California attorney general in next year’s election, said the changes were designed to make privacy controls simpler for users. “We believe that when tools are simple, people are more likely to use them and understand them,” said Mr Kelly.
This signals a direct positioning in competition to Twitter and solidifies statements going around that facebook suffers from severe Twitter envy . At the same time , the privacy chief of the company assured public that their fears for privacy getting compromised are unfounded and that the company was doing everything to ensure that the privacy fears are alleviated . It is worth noting at this time that the company has been subject to increasing flak for the way it offers data to application writers where the user has no control over what information is exposed . There is a Federal Complaint that the users have lodged against the Paolo Alto based Social Media giant .
What is more interesting is their plans to implement “followers” , people who follow your updates but are not necessarily known to you or part of your network on Facebook . That would be a verbatim copy of what Twitter is now doing . Personally one would want to see a facebook that is more user friendly . The limits that they have on the number of friends you can have have to go . Also perplexing is the fact that if you have a high frequency of updates , Facebook calls it a “virus like” activity and immediately your password is reset , I have first hand experience of this as I am one of the users who updates both twitter and facebook at the same time . I have gone through this eight times already . I can understand if it is a limit for the system’s performance , but not as a matter of policy .
Good that facebook wants to help me get more public , I just wish that they were more friendly with me too !
