Granular privacy on Facebook?

[charmian]

It seems that Facebook has granular privacy on some things, like notes and photos, and may soon have it on status (it's a beta feature not available to all users yet). (See links for more information)

I think, IMHO that this is a type of granular privacy actually superior to LJ's, because without going through the trouble of creating a separate filter, you can filter something to just one or two people (or possibly multiple Friends Lists), or exclude only one (or more) people. I'm not sure how widespread the usage of this feature is among FB users, though. Were I to use FB for communicating w/ people more often, though, this would definitely come in handy.

The beta feature of being able to do this for the activity stream as well sounds nice too, but unfortunately it isn't yet possible for all users to do this.

I wonder what effect this will have on rival social networks? Some theorize this is FB having a go at Twitter which has simple privacy (either your Twitter account is 100% public or 100% private).

Comments

[matgb]

Interesting expansion. One of the things I really like about FBs settings for privacy (not that I use FB much) is the way you can simply exclude a group from seeing something--"all friends except", without having to create multiple filters.

Every so often, I'd like to post something planning a surprise or something--a simple way of 'all friends except X" would be good, and is possible on FB.

Definitely like the idea of status being granular, might use it a bit more as distinct from simply importing tweets.

[charmian]

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to find out that FB had such detailed security features. I hope they roll out the granular status privacy to all users soon.

[pne]

Some theorize this is FB having a go at Twitter which has simple privacy (either your Twitter account is 100% public or 100% private).

I find that a bit annoying about Twitter, too.

[sempai]

randomly, have you ever checked out Plurk? While I dislike some of the terminology it uses, it allows you to create groups of friends, filter to all friends, these specific groups you've created and specific users from your friend list.

It's more like twitter in that there is a restricted message length, but the best part about is that people can reply to your plurk entry and it all is collected in one page, and it's more like IMing that way. It's pretty cool.

[charmian]

Oh, is that so? I saw you were using it, but I didn't know about its features. That does sound pretty cool. I'll check it out!