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It's no shock that MT is now adding these features, as does all of the other 6A sites are doing.
Even with privacy controls built-in to Facebook - have you read the terms of service? Facebook, Google, (insert your provider of choice) are all subject to takeover, buyout, bankruptcy, change of direction, data theft, change of leadership (evil), etc. If you trust these people to truly trust your privacy at some point you're in for a rude awakening.
Like the email rule of old, you best assume transparency is the rule before you share.
Ever tinkered with the WordPress PRIVATE features? We set up a standalone WordPress.com blog a few months ago and made some posts password protected and some not. The plumbing worked really well.
I think Matt and co also have purely password protected spaces too for entire groups of people (like family). They'll have to have WordPress accounts. So, unfortunately, Yet-Another-Password... Pix are no problem. But private video? Don't even think about it (yet) on WordPress... It has to be hosted someplace in the clear for it to embed properly.
Man I wish Leopard Server was out in the open RFN. Teams has a LOT of what you're wanting - privacy governed by rules, group calendar, messaging... For that matter so does Podcast Producer. Patrick would make an awesome Leopard admin for you guys (maybe even enthusiastic... you think?) MS SBS might have some of that too. MS is my eggplant though... won't touch the stuff unless tricked into it.
Gerald, Tulsa
I hosted a private EZboard a few years ago...password protected access for about 20 people. I quit paying for the account, told them to close it, and assumed they would destroy it. Instead, they put ads all over it and opened it to the public, against my knowledge or consent. I ran across it accidently recently from a Google search. It took me three weeks of contacting them and threatening them with legal action to get something done, and even now it's still there. The most that I got out of them was access again so that I could delete the forums one by one by one. It took me hours to do. I would love to sue the hell out of them, but I couldn't even get a physical address to serve papers to.
Once you put something on the web, it becomes permanent. Commitments to keep it private probably won't be. Facebook may be the darling now, but what's going to happen to all that information when something else takes its place? You may trust a platform today, but what happens when it changes hands tomorrow?
There's an old saying: don't tell anybody what you want nobody to know. I think a version of that applies to anything web related.
It would be nice to have that level of granularity at Facebook as well. "I only want these friends to see these pictures, this application, this status message", etc. It would make it easier to manage the "public" persona for the world, of potential employers, clients, business partners, and the "private" persona for your close friends.
This is a couple of features we give for granted on email and taht I also really miss on FB...
Meanwhile, you've been blogging up a storm yourself, rather than doing all the work in Google Reader. Nice to see that.
I like the way you are looking at privacy but I wonder how having fine control of our social graph at the unit-of-conversation level will work for just plain folks. It could get tedious, be easy to lose track of, etc.
This has me baffled, although it is easy to think of, say, publish-and-subscribe models and some kind of authenticated, authorized RSS or Atom Publishing goodie that works that finely. The question is how can people use it in its user-interactive form and how can they be confident about what is happening with it?
Considering that most of us don't have a clue how OpenID or Information Cards works in our favor, and even the user-centric identity people are allergic to public-key stuff, I think this is going to be very difficult.
Per-item control on everything you post. You can have multiple groups of friends, and set items to be readably by only some groups. The same goes for LJ Scrapbook, their photo-hosting service.
Sure, it's not trendy like Facebook, but it's functional.
Not to mention that nearly NONE of my friends or family are on LiveJournal. Remember, I had people begging me to join Facebook for months before I did. I remember Kevin Rose telling me I +had+ to get onto Facebook. He never said that about LiveJournal.
You know my feelings on privacy and children. I can't recommend highly enough on keeping pictures and info about Milan OUT of the public eye. Tom Cruise may have gone all wacko, but even he was smart enough to keep 99% of his baby's life private.
For my son, I have a private Web site powered by Wordpress. Photos are marked private on Flickr, but accessible through the WP site. Videos I upload manually through the WP interface to my hosted account. My family all have the name/password to log in, and all keep up with his pictures, news, and videos via the "blog". For me, it's the perfect combo.
Best wishes to you & Maryam as your date nears!
And as a managing partner at MuseCrafters I stand by that pledge.
Family bloggers long ago decided that if you want to use the internet to be really, really selective about who sees what, use LiveJournal. It's totally uncool, but LiveJournal has millions of users precisely because of the option to severely limit who sees what.
And I agree that it's up to the companies providing the services to implement granular controls in order for users to feel comfortable enough to post private information. So thanks for continuing this conversation.
Where I disagree with your post is that Flickr does *not* provide that granularity. My work friends are mostly different than my non-work friends, and there are things I would show certain people in my family but not others. My life isn't simple enough that I can divide it down a neat line of "friends" on one side and "family" on the other. I was disappointed when Flickr's recent improvement was collections and not contact groups. I keep hoping they will rectify this.
Look at my profile there is an application in there that allows me to point my profile viewers to an app to email me via my email address rather than message me via FB messaging..
~biff~