Matt Astifan Goes Public 

Yesterday I decided to go public…on the “stock market” and also made my personal profile on Facebook public!

Why?  I decided to trust Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s long term strategy: “making the web open and social”

Here is how it happened:

I was searching Facebook for an old friend and when I found him I noticed that he had his entire profile set to “Private” with the exception of Facebook Questions. I wondered why… so I looked into it and realized you cannot make Questions private! 

This got me thinking… Why did Facebook create a new feature that cannot be set to private while all the other featured have an option of private or public? I came to the conclusion that Facebook has been making many strategic moves over the years to get users to make their profiles public.

Sooo… I gave a little more trust to Zuck and made my profile public. After my first “public” post I had over 30 comments which included two “non-Facebook-friends” which also resulted in 4 new Facebook Fans… Interesting hey!

Here is the one rule you need to follow if you decide to do this: Don’t share anything 

PRIVATE online! (you shouldn’t be doing this anyways)

What are your thoughts on Facebook Privacy? Are you locked down or completely public?

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The Age of Privacy, Over?

Last year people were still saying “Oh my god, I Googled myself last night and you wont believe what I found..” Well this year people are saying “Oh my god I can’t figure out whats public about my Facebook page anymore!” Even I lost track of how many times Facebook changed its privacy settings and left my profile more public then I’d prefer it to be.

The un-privacy you should be aware of:

  • By default a lot more of your information is public.
  • The pages you Fan cannot be hidden, this isn’t too serious.
  • You can no longer hide your activity (eg. comments on friend’s updates and links, relationship status and activity you perform while making changes to your profile) now, you have to manually delete this stuff. Again nothing major.. but why do this?
  • Your friend list is public, and there is nothing you can do about it, this bothers me. Facebook shouldn’t be making this choice for their users.

The fact is now you have less privacy then you originally signed up for and Facebook has certainly risked losing their users confidence by this move.

Although the web is changing to a more “public” environment, I don’t think Mark made the privacy changes to benefit his users. If we can agree he didn’t do it for the users then the question is; how does the public accessibility of our information fit into Facebooks upcoming revenue model?

I do understand that just like business, Social Networks need to adapt to their users [where MySpace failed] or force the users to adapt to it, as Facebook is continually asking us to do.

Only time will tell how these changes will affect the largest social network it’s 300,000,000+ users.