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So its important to keep that in mind when you look at the changes Facebooks making. She can put up photographs and be tagged in her friends photos, post status updates, and comment on peoples walls and I cant see that. And thats why shes comfortable having such complex and rich interactions with her friends there. The fact that you could determine who saw your data was the reason why people put so much information about themselves on Facebook. Just to give an elementary example my 18-year-old daughter is on Facebook and she has 700 friends on there or something like that, but Im not one of them. And something that a lot of people that get caught up in the Facebook privacy controversy sometimes forget, is that Facebook from the beginning has had more privacy control than any service on the Internet by far. So, Facebook launched with a lot of privacy control. So she can do all these things on Facebook and use it very freely. So shes much more comfortable doing all that stuff knowing that her dear old Dad cant spy on her, right? Thats genuine privacy control.

But with many of the changes that Zuckerberg has made with Facebook hes pushed a little too far and hes exposed a little too much information about people for them to be comfortable with at that moment, which sometimes has led to a lot of problems. And they have basically been comfortable with that because the way Facebook works, and the reason that its exciting and satisfying to use, is because so much information is available about you to your friends. In the end, he has continually exposed more and more data about people. But what happens is that time and time again is that hes encountered resistance, made a minor tweak or two, gotten into a dialogue with the people who were protesting, more or less addressed their problems and moved forward in a two-steps-forward-one-step-backwards fashion. And Zuckerberg keeps pushing that.

By making someone your friend on Facebook, in fact, youre subscribing to information about them and if youre not really interested in them, that information is going to basically feel like spam. Now, I have over 1,000 friends so I obviously dont completely practice that myself. Youre not going to care what these people do that are supposedly your friends.. I dont think people should do that because if you accept people as Facebook friends who you dont really know, your Facebook experience declines. But I also have another 850 or 900 people who have requested friendship with me that I have not accepted because I didnt know them. As for my advice for how I think people should use Facebook the number one thing Id say is that to really use Facebook the way it was intended and to get the best use of it as it was designed, you really should limit the friends that you accept to people you really know, in the real world, and care about to some degree at least. Im not into collecting Facebook friends to show that I have more than you.

So dont have the illusion that anything you put on Facebook is really, truly, secure because there are a lot of ways that information can bleed out of Facebook.The way I use Facebook is to not put anything in it that I would be uncomfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper. Another piece of advice is that, even though Facebook has extremely good privacy control and theres a lot of control that you can exert over who sees your data, its not in a safe with a lock. So you really dont want to put your most intimate secrets on Facebook, or the photos that betray your most intimate information. Thats not what you should share there because there are a lot of ways that that information might escape your control. I think that test is a good one for people to apply.

Innovation on the Internet is more intense and fervent than anywhere else in business, so hes going to keep experimenting, keep pushing, keep tweaking, keep changing, keep remaking so you can expect Facebook in two years to look quite a bit different than it does now. Itll probably have a lot of features that it doesnt have now. I mean right now theyre testing something called Facebook Questions, which is a way to ask your friends questions about anything you want and people who arent your friends also. That will probably become a standard feature and itll add a lot more information there, which will probably help with some of the marketing work they do but it will also just make it a richer experience. Mark Zuckerberg is aware that he is competing with an enormous number of other companies that are trying to take his business away. In terms of where its going, the only thing that one has to remember about Facebook is that it is going to continue to change.

Although I do have over 1,000 friends, which is a pretty large number, Im just a pretty public guy. Are you on Facebook? What are your privacy settings?Yes, Ive been on Facebook for more than three years. Anything I put on Facebook can only be accessed by my friends I have my settings made so that only my friends can see my data. Im pretty conservative when it comes to my settings.

We need to think harder about the way we use such an integral part of our lives. Will you accept my friend request?If you request me I probably will. Im trying to promote my book and youre a journalist writing about this phenomenon. If it were the typical meet someone at a conference thing I probably wouldnt want to be friends with you unless Im genuinely interested in your information.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EpkPAv-pCE&feature=youtube_gdata

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