Facebook has been going through some modifications recently. You probably noticed the shift to your home page, taking on a more “twitter”-like sense of immediacy. Naturally, the pushback from users was swift but I have a feeling that we’ll adjust eventually or Facebook will allow us to customize our home page more in the future. Just seems to be the natural course of things in web interfaces to ultimately give the user more control as the site matures and adds features.
The other most recent change at Facebook allows you more granular control over the public or private nature of your profile information. That profile might include your educational and work history, your contact information, even your status updates if you get granular. You can now allow portions of this information to be seen by “everyone” which means anyone with a Facebook account. If you want to use Facebook in a “twitter” fashion, sharing much of your life with complete strangers, you now have this option. I’m not sure who this is meant to appeal to, but it’s a step towards providing more options in how you set up Facebook. To review these options for yourself, log in to the Facebook site, click on “Settings” and then “Privacy”. You can start with the Privacy settings for your Profile to see the new “Everyone” option.
Anastasia Goodstein of YPulse, who writes about youth marketing issues, has an interesting post regarding the discussion among teachers of how to effectively use
Facebook with their students. The jury is out still on whether or not it’s a best practice for a teacher to allow their students into their social networks so a number of options are being used. Some schools ban the practice altogether. Some teachers make their own policies and don’t friend a student until they have left the school and gone on to college. (Remember, you are supposed to be High School-aged when you join these social networks.) Other teachers have carefully crafted a public profile to use with students while managing a more personal profile they use with real friends. I’m happy that at least for now, none of my children’s teachers are “friending” my kids. I really am not comfortable with any teacher directly communicating with my children in a way that avoids parental oversight. Please call them on the house phone or send them an email via the parent’s account.