Phase 4 has launched. Last week we told you about Facebook’s new “everyone button” that lets users who have chosen to keep their profiles at least partially private send the occasional status message or other content out to the public. That feature, which goes hand-in-hand with the recent search engine for public status messages, launched today to a small number of users.
Don’t be fooled by what appears to be a minor change in the user interface. This is another indication of Facebook’s extreme desire to get users to make as much of their data public as possible. Just like Twitter.
This new version of Publisher lets users add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. Each piece of content can be shared with everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends and friends. Users can also customize the settings further.
You can now control who you want to inform of your Facebook friends when you add any kind of content to the site. Here’s how it works: After writing a status, uploading a photo or creating other content from the Publisher, use the lock icon in the lower-right corner of the Publisher to access the drop-down menu. From there, you can then choose to make the post visible to everyone, friends and certain networks, friends of friends, and a custom list.
Definitely, a good feature to add as it will encourage more people to share.
Sometimes I want to set my status to something that I don’t want people from work to see which I’m not able to do right now.
I think it will fail. Facebook has my real name. I don’t want to put stuff out there like do on twitter in my real name. Also I am friends with my boss and his boss and former professors from college. Facebook is too much a part of my professional life for it to become as personal as Twitter.
Hi Leena,
That’s actually a great feature when you want to separate your business updates from your personal ones. I’m sure all Facebook user gonna love it.
Thanks for the great post.
Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing
Nice enhancement. However, you can control who sees your status updates now using privacy settings and lists. For example, if you want to prevent business contacts from seeing your statuses, set up a list called “Business” and add your business friends. Then, go to your privacy settings | profile | status and links. Select “customize” from the drop down. There’s a place to exclude individuals or lists.
Although this option excludes all status updates from view.
Yes but that privacy settings are for all updates. This feature allows you to set privacy for your updates individually.
Yes, confirming the confirmed: “Although this option excludes all status updates from view.”
Obviously if you select ‘everyone on the internet’ that includes your business friends.
HUGE game changer for Facebook: no longer the closed community, but now able to be open to the wider web for those who *choose* to do it. Yay!
I believe that this will be a direct blocking move to what MySpace should/may be doing, as well as a defensive move against Twitter.
Today Facebook is your place for “friends”, “acquaintances”, and “business contacts” (shared with LinkedIn on the business contacts front). MySpace has a capability to be YourPublicSpace, a place where you maintain your PUBLIC facing digital self. Since most users don’t understand rights management (or settings of any type), the argument could be made that they will want to have a separate service for their public life and keep Facebook as their private life service.
MySpace could offer a public place for :
- Your Web Site (multiple customizable pages with easy to use builder interface such as Weebly )
- Your Blog (an implementation of WordPress that takes advantage of the WordPress Theme ecosystem)
- Your Live Video Feed and Chat Room (along the lines of UStream)
- Your Photos (Publicly facing, with a plugin that let’s you easily move photos from any website (specifically Facebook) into your MySpace public photos.
- Your Videos (Publicly facing, with a plugin that let’s you move your videos from YouTube, or any other service into MySpace video (no one should care where the video is hosted with embedding being prevalent)
- Your Dating Profile (Today MySpace is perhaps the largest dating site in the world, although they try to gloss that over promoting it as a music/content service. Embrace dating, build a rockin’ dating profile/search, and dip into Match’s business)
- Your Resume/Bio (a copy of what you have posted on LinkedIN)
- Your Newsfeeds (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) (an aggregation of all the feeds that a user may have across different services.)
Basically MySpace should be a consolidation of all things YOU, PUBLICLY FACING. I would even let people register domain names, and point them to MySpace.com/yourname, yet another revenue source.
They should also consider offering a premium subscription (for publishers) that takes ads of the site and creates a pristine user experience.
The interfaces need to be COMPLETELY re-done (keep the back end services and rebuild the middle/front end), and make sure that there is a RICH and WELL DOCUMENTED/SUPPORTED API that lets third party developers extend the product (including a human function within the company that evangelizes/recruits developers).
Now the question is when this will be available to mobile clients.
This also means people could post photos of you and make them available to entire world wide web rather than just the facebook family. Can we say job hunters beware?
Go to privacy settings and turn off the ability for anyone to see a photo tagged of you. Or just allow for friends to see photos tagged of you. Problem solved.
I’m waiting for the TC post
“Facebook loses privacy settings: everyone’s profile content available to everyone”
Sorry to ask this here instead of email.
Could you please do a story on Facebook recommending “friends” from your Gmail and other email accounts?
Situation: I did the standard find your friends from your email contact list. Problem is that I did this more than a year ago with the belief that my login credentials to Gmail would be stored by Facebook.
Now, I (and others) are getting friend suggestions a year later of people who are clearly not friends or whom we have no secondary connection to on Facebook. These are coming from my Gmail account. People, for instance, that I emailed one time when looking for housing on Craigslist.
Major privacy issue, breach of TOS, and potential class-action lawsuit.
Correction: “..belief that my login credentials to Gmail would NOT be stored by Facebook. “
Good feature.
I have been using the feature for all my notes. It good facebook now puts more priority on it so we can share everything with everybody
http://www.face...adesojiadegbulu
It’s awesome to see Facebook further complicate things and make it completely impossible to wrap your head around what others can see and what they can’t at any given time. This will surely save me time because I will continue to decrease my usage of the stupid site.
i hear ya. you need a mind map or ‘you are here’ type of thing for where your posts go. but i still enjoy FB and connecting with people.
I would like the same thing but with friends lists added to “everyone”, “networks” and “friends”.
that would be amazing! then you could post whatever you wanted and just adjust who sees what (some posts for everyone, some posts for close friends, some posts for co-workers, etc., etc., etc.) talk about nice, simple customization
Leena is so smart!
The two options “Friends of Friends” and “Friends and Networks” always struck me as odd. There’s not a strict order of most restrictive to least restrictive.
These two options overlap on “Friends” but neither contains the other.
Thats what I have been waiting for a looooooong time !!
This is a great feature…
….talk about facebook’s mighty userbase starting to share their content to the world!!
tats massive…
thought an additonal feature of a nickname option while we select the “Everyone” option would be a great add on.
i mean nickname option on the lines of yahoo public profiles.
though i wud use my original profile name for sharing while on “everyone” mode.. nicknames wud b useful on some occasions making facebook a place i can share to the world on my own terms….
though making an another facebook account solves it for now.
lol….
We have had this featuer since we were in alpha…
Why can’t I see the lock button on my FB page? Is it available only in certain countries as of now?
The publisher privacy icon or lock icon is not shown on my FB page, why?
how do you remove this feature? i dont want it
I am in Vancouver BC Canada, and I don’t see the button.. Any clues as to why? My guess it hasn’t been rolled out here? Maybe legal issues with Canada??
This will be a powerful tool though for marketing yourself to a wider audience on FB.. I’ve been saying for a while that the next step for Facebook is to create separated streams so that people can tailor their message to different sectors of their life (ie. work, friends, family)..
As a young, fun-loving person (AKA I do a lot of silly s**t and people post photos of that silly s**t on Facebook all the time) it is difficult bring clients and even certain sects of my family into my Facebook world.
I’m in Brazil and I can’t see it either
That’s nice.
Well, I have specified Everyone in every single setting, every single photo, every single Comment; and nothing NOTHING is being forwarded to anybody in my network, ESPECIALLY not to the News Feed.
So, there’s another obstacle in place.
:shrug:
That’s nice.
Well, I have specified Everyone in every single setting, every single photo, every single Comment; and nothing NOTHING is being forwarded to anybody in my network, ESPECIALLY not to the News Feed.
So, there’s another obstacle in place.
:shrug: