This morning’s Observer column…

Aw, isn’t that sweet? The nice folks at Facebook are anxious to ‘help more people connect and find value’ from their social networking site. Let’s see how that will work in practice. Someone types ‘John Smith’ into Google - and up comes his Facebook public search listing. To find out more about this fascinating chap, however, the searcher has to either log into Facebook (if s/he is already a member), or subscribe to the service if s/he is not. Either way, the searcher is lured into Facebook’s walled garden. Does this help John Smith ‘find value’ from Facebook? Well, maybe - if he’s desperate for his personal details to be accessible to anyone on the web. But the main beneficiary of this erosion in users’ privacy will be the company that operates Facebook, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Of course, Facebook’s owners protest that members can avoid this by adjusting their privacy settings. But you only have to look at a few Facebook profiles to see that most subscribers either don’t know how to limit the amount of personal information that is displayed on their profiles, or simply cannot be bothered. So, coming soon to an office near you: some really embarrassing job interviews…

From Scobleizer…

One of my friends caught his teenage son having a party because his son posted some pictures of that party to his Facebook page. Let’s just say that “dad� isn’t allowed into his Facebook profile anymore. This is yet another example of the problems that Facebook users are facing. Forget the fact that many of you believe that parents should have transparency into their kids lives. This was a case where a kid put some content up that he didn’t want someone else to find yet they did. Same thing as an employer finding a photo of you doing something that they would find to be a fireable offense. There is going to be a lot of tension about Facebook until it adds much better privacy controls. Some things deserve to be open to the public (and to Google). Glad to see Facebook is recognizing that. But other things should only be kept for close personal friends. I wish I could set Facebook stuff to be shared with the audience I want to share that media with (whether or not I usually want to make my stuff totally public).

This one will run and run. The issue is surfacing all over the place. At the panel discussion after my Keynote Address at Leeds Metropolitan University last Monday, for example, there was an interesting discussion about whether lecturers should be in Facebook (i.e. whether their presence was an intrusion on what should be regarded as a ’student’ space).