In writing that previous post about Facebook, I had a few other thoughts that didn’t really fit. I have collected them here.

Privacy and the Facebook feed

Facebook users are familiar with the news feed of what is going on with their friends. In general, when your Facebook friends make updates to their profile, you will read about it in your feed. E.g., “Joshua M. Neff added ‘They Might Be Giants’ to his favorite music” or “5 of your friends joined the group Internet Librarian 2007.”

Facebook give users a lot of control over what information about themselves will appear in their friends’ feeds. So if you don’t want people to see the comments you make on photos, or when you leave a group, or write a wall post, you can un-check those boxes.

But people don’t always think to change those privacy options, and can’t always anticipate how their actions on Facebook might look from the vantage point of that feed.

A recent post on BoingBoing led me to Thomas Crampton’s How Facebook ended my marriage about how an engaged couple’s friends freaked out when they removed their relationship status information from their Facebook profiles. Nothing about their relationship changed, they just changed their profile info. And their friends lost their minds on Twitter.

I think a similar thing happened to Jessamyn West recently when she updated her profile to say that she was married to the moon. Her feed just showed that her relationship status had changed to “married,” with no mention of to whom. I, myself, found this odd enough to mention to someone–I forget now if it was by private IM or in the LSW Meebo room–though I was pretty sure it was a joke.

Anyway, when we talk about online library applications that may have privacy implications, there is often the feeling that as long as we give people enough privacy controls, we needn’t worry too much. I think that incidents like these show that it can be hard, even for savvy users, to imagine ahead of time how our actions in social software environments might look when stripped of context and published in a feed of some kind. Crampton and his fiance thought they were increasing their privacy. Jessamyn thought everyone would see that her new life partner was the moon. Who is to say what that feed of recently-checked-out books will look like on a widget somewhere?

Terms of Use

I have been looking at the Terms of Use for Facebook users, and, not being a lawyer, it’s a little hard for me to suss out exactly what rights one gives up by posting stuff to the site. They seem relatively innocuous, in that I can understand their need to assert some rights over “User Content” to allow them to re-publish uploaded stuff in different contexts. And the “non-exclusive” seems to mean that they aren’t trying to claim outright ownership of anything their users create.

Mark Lindner put me on to a post entitled Facebook, Academia, and Intellectual Property from a blog called Weibel Lines which seems to interpret the terms in the same way I do. But I don’t know. Anyone got a better idea about what this means in real life?

The class of 2011

In my last post on Facebook, I mentioned the Colorado College – Class of 2011 group. I got the idea to go looking for this group after reading Brian “the Ubiquitous Librarian” Mathews’ post, Making a Good First Impression: FaceBook & Incoming Freshmen.

CC’s group currently has 356 members (the incoming class totals about 530 people) with over 2,300 wall posts and 130 discussion topics on the discussion board. I haven’t dug into the boards yet, but from reading the wall, I have a pretty good idea of what some of their top concerns are (my impressions, not statistically tabulated): meal plan (is the “gold” plan enough food? A ripoff?), what First Year Experience class people are taking, CC Tiger Hockey, the “all-class reads” book assignment, when exactly those forms need to be in the admissions office, special sheets for dorm beds, how do I get my CC email address, etc. A few people claim to be posting drunk, at least one guy is TROLLING IN ALL CAPS (he is completely ignored), the usual stuff.

I haven’t jumped in to the conversation as Brian has for the Georgia Tech group, but I’m going to keep my eye on it. If it seems appropriate, then I’ll weigh in.