Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

The changes, the updates and all associated to the much loved privacy on the Facebook platform have raised quite a controversy. I guess that has something to do with the initial post about the updates being very vague, not to forget that many users found them to be having them go public. Well the social network is helping its users with a three step transition to help them get along with the new privacy settings, hoping that it satisfies every user of the platform. And they are so bent upon having you see the transition steps that they wont show you the setting unless you have seen the steps.

I was reading a comment from our reader and he complained:

The possibility to hide our own friends list to some people or lists! I find it a big violation of my own privacy: I chose to hide my friends list from some groups of people who could just access the mutual friends, now they can see my whole list. And no way to go back as it was before!

Well Facebook has taken some sort of notice about such complains and has removed the View Friends so that a minimum number of your friends is made visible in the search results. Plus it also lets you edit the number of friends that are visible on your profile to others. You can do so by editing Friend’s box and decide who is visible and to whom. As for the fear of user profiles going public, you are even allowed to decide who can see you in search, within Facebook or for the search engines.

The other securities include letting you limit access to your wall, be it friends or from applications. This isn’t any different from the older setting we had added with letting you control if apps can actually make posts on your wall. I hope the users read this one, it is so annoying when they are involved in games and every now and then there is an update coming in as to who has got a new gift and how many farms points one has. I just want to get rid of that.

Step by Step:

Access your settings and select Privacy Settings, once done you are shown how you can setup your profile settings, contact and search preferences.

Profile & Contact Information:

This gives you a better control as to who can see your profile and who cannot. Like you can  decide what bit of your information is visible to all, friends of friends, just friends or even customize. The last option is pretty nice, given that you have lists and want certain part of your information hidden from some people, like family members, etc. These setting can be applied to any part of your profile information, all the way to the comments on posts.

The same goes for the contact information you have at the social network. The best being giving you the control as to who can add you as friends. Primarily you are open to be added by anyone who gives a search, but with this you can limit that option by letting only those add you as one if you have mutual friends with the person. But I just wonder if its really worth it? With so many people connected or should I say inter-connected that we are bound to have a friend or two in common. But nonetheless a positive move.

Applications & Websites:

As explained this gives you a better grip on the privacy setting over applications / web pages and how they communicate with you; as in the updates, etc that appear from time to time on your wall. This also means that lesser applications have the privilege to actually contact you or fill your wall up.

Search & Block:

Perhaps the best of updates. You can simply decide whether you appear in search results on Facebook to all or just friends and their friends. Once again it helps you secure yourself from people you don’t want to be in touch with, given that it released custom URLs that made it easier to find people (to a certain extent). Plus there is the check box that you can uncheck to make your Facebook profile invisible to Search Engines other than Facebook [Google, Yahoo, etc].

The  last is the Block option. Simply enter the name of the person you want blocked or the email address. Those contacts will be added to the Block List, ensuring that you are invisible to them and they aren’t able to communicate with you in any manner.

To be honest, those updates sound better as of now. There are a bit of glitches still but that will take time. The backlash as of present is primarily because of the very extensive post on the Facebook Blog that emphasized more on the update, keeping it so hidden that users thought of it to be thrust upon them. That looks quite a bit better once you actually go through the settings, seriously you don’t think that some social network would give you super powers to fully customize the social network.