So far I am not super-impressed. It has one deal-killer flaw. Everyone is either friend or not-friend, there is no in-between.
It does a good job of showing me who’s in the system that I might want to contact. But there is no intermediary step where I can catch up, see their basic profile, and then stop. Nope, it’s either full access or nothing. I don’t want to give everyone full access. I don’t mind putting semi-personal stuff out there, but I see no reason to tell 150 people how I blew my fantasy football season. An old buddy sent me an invite. I haven’t seen him for 15 years, I want to know what he’s up to, but I don’t want to give him the same access as my real friends. Mrs. Muttrox is peeved because she crossed the line of professionalism – she has too many colleagues on her friend list. Now she feels that she can’t do anything fun because her next employer will know about it. I am friends with lots of people at work in the real world but I am reluctant to add most of them to my Facebook friend list.
This problem is doubly stupid because it’s so easily solved. All you need to do is add a layer called “acquaintances”. Or add a few layers, you can set any person to be friend “level” 1-4. Or you could have separate access for friends and colleagues. Then you decide what levels can see anything that goes up on your wall and such. It’s a trivial programming issue.
Feel free to send me a friend request. If I don’t accept it’s nothing personal. Unfortunately I am unable to merely dip my toe in the friendship water, it seems you have to take a full dive. I don’t want to.
Mrs. Muttrox’s 2 cents-
1. Becca is the only one commenting who really knows the first thing about Facebook.
2. Becca, I was just reading about the graying of Facebook. I thought MySpace was for you twenty-somethings and Facebook had been mostly relegated to the 30+ crowd.
3. In direct contrast to point #2, I did almost shut my whole profile down when I got a friend request from my 16 year-old babysitter.
You can set your privacy such that people cannot find you on Facebook, or set it up such that only current Facebook Friends can find you or “Friends of Friends”….this way it’ll limit the random people who invite you…
Tweaking Facebook settings isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but I had to do it — I’m pretty sure my 20-something card would be revoked if I opted out of Facebook entirely. Maybe I’ll shut down my profile when I hit 30. 😉
(almost forgot…Hail Eris)
Call me paranoid, but I think facebook and myspace are simply ways to track people, built by the gnomes of zurich.
They also make my soup too hot.
You are totally right, Mutt, that you cannot change the settings in any manner that makes any sense to normal human beings. I think it’s a cute site, but it’s not like I’m going to keep a lot of private information on there!
And I can’t figure out how to change privacy settings for “friend groups.” I’m just not seeing it…hmm. There are ways to change which “networks” see your profile info, but other than that, it certainly isn’t easy, and I can’t find it. Oh, heck, the whole site is obfuscated.
Facebook’s settings are actually pretty customizable. You can set up “friend groups” and apply blanket privacy (or lack thereof) settings to entire groups. So you could set up a group of “acquaintances” and make it so they can only see your basic profile (e.g., favorite music) but not your silly status messages or pictures…stuff like that. Of course that might be more trouble than you feel like dealing with, but…it can be done. Just so ya know!
(Cue the chorus of “Kids these days…!”)
An “acquaintances” setting would be excellent. Once i do the initial catch-up, I want to dump most of these people – or at least prevent them from annoying me. An Acquaintance setting would do that nicely.
the think I really hate about it is there is NO WAY to delete your account. Impossible. You can only put it down to sleep….that’s the thing that annoys me the most.