The number one facebook blog www.allfacebook.com has a guide for sale that show you how to manage your privacy settings on facebook.

The Holy Grail of Facebook Privacy is a simple guide to protecting yourself on Facebook and making sure you never end up with an embarrassing situation that could have lasting repercussions, potentially even costing your job.

It runs to 24 detailed pages. This is not for normal people. Normal people will not buy this book. Normal people will not read a detailed 24 page guide to navigating the privacy setting on facebook. Normal people will not keep updating and curating setting at the level of detail required as their social networks morph and grow. Facebook privacy is not attainable by normal people. The settings are just too complicated and detailed. They are too offputting and require too much attention and curation.

The result: Here's a light-hearted take on how your sense of privacy is easily compromised by people like your Mom.
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Here's how it easily compromised by you:

Conclusion: Facebook's privacy setting are truly only a fig-leaf of protection. They only serve to protect us from the embarassament we feel. About what we know to be the truth of human nature.

The news. Facebook, once again, got smacked on the wrist by its userbase.

Zuckerberg has indicated that the swift and negative reaction to their recent efforts to amend the terms of service had helped him realise it was now time to deal with this. Facebook plans to prevent this happening again.

They've presented their plan as 'Facebook opens discussion on a 'bill of rights' for the governance of their userbase.'

What this really means: The reality is that this intervention will affect the SOCIAL DYNAMIC on Facebook in a very significant way. This intervention will: 1. Defuse 'Stop Energy'. 2. Clear the way for 'Forward Motion'.

More on 'Stop Energy' and 'Forward Motion'.

'Stop Energy': Most types of collective action organize around 'Stop Energy'. Facebook users have mobilised and engaged in 'Stop Energy' to great success time and again. Its the only effective power available to the users of Facebook. Or any large-scale informally organised collective. Rerouting 'Stop Energy' into a pseudo-democratic consultation process will effectively quench its power. As an act of political hegemony if would be described as the employment of a bureaucracy to make power seem remote and tiresome to engage in for the typical user on any particular issue.

'Forward Motion': ''Forward Motion' is very difficult to initiate or progress in informally organised collectives. However, 'Forward Motion' is the raison d'etre of formal organisations and firms. Facebook, like any other formal organisation is a lean, mean and very effective machine at mobilising 'Forward Motion'. Naturally, Facebook will leverage this ability to drive forward the Facebook agenda.

Political hegemony: At large scale, collective action is best mobilised by a simple coordinating signal. And best extinguished by efforts at large-scale collective conversation. Facebook now reroutes collective action into collective conversation. Its a master-stroke of a political hegemony. Its a classic 'bait-and-switch'.

Nice stroke, Facebook.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result: Albert Einstein

How many attempts have Yahoo made at breaking into social networking? Yahoo360 anyone? Yahoo Mixd? Efforts to buy Facebook? And now Yahoo Mash has closed after less than a year in operation.

If you've tested your assumptions and found them to be false. Try some new assumptions...

Anyway, here's the assumptions that Yahoo keeps making. And keeps proving to be false: 1. "If you build it, they will come." 2. "Existing community + social networking tools = vibrant social network" Very expensive mistakes in their own rights. But think of the opportunity costs! If Yahoo! had "done a MySpace or a Facebook" things would be looking very different today.

Community is organic, not mechanic

So what did these other guys do differently? They understood that community is an organic entity that emerges bottom up. MySpace identified bands with a need to get the word out through friend-of-a-friend networks. Facebook identified students with a need to get to know who's who when thrust into an whole new social scene. MySpace and Facebook identified latent communities and gave these latent communities the tools to let them nurture themselves into existence. Without this realisation, a social network is just a shiny new tool that is about to start rusting through neglect the moment it has been created. Yahoo never got this. They never understood that a community emerges through an organic process. They have never reached down to nurture the relationships that prime the emergence of community.

Electroconvulsive therapy

Yahoo wasn't always insane. It has lost its way. Yahoo have had a lot of smart people working for them over the years, but it must have been like some kind of Tower of Babel in there. Somehow none of that cleverness seemed to be able to make its way through the commitees and into the products. Case in point: Caterina Fake of Flickr fame was one of the key people to show the world how to do community on the web in the first place. She also ran the Technology Development group, known for its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to innovation and creativity, and Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products. When you've had that kind of instinct, experience, talent and set up on your side. And your still not producing anything that makes any sense in the social networking space. Then, there is something seriously wrong with the system. At the very least, it needs rebooting. It may well be time to roll out the gurney, electrodes and conductant tape...

Joe Drumgoole invited me to join him on his regular technology slot on "The Right Hook" last Monday. Good fun. I relayed a couple of tales illustrating some of the pretty unexpected ways innocent use of Facebook could end up biting you in the *ss. These are not isolated incidents. There's a story in the paper every day. In fact, as if to prove the point Darren from Putplace picked up this story on breaking news right after the show.

A winger with Crystal Palace, shared the fact that he was about to have a trial with Fulham with a select group of his friends via Facebook. Or so he thought. The details of the message could be seen by all 2.7m members of the site who have joined its London section. As a member of the London section himself he unwittingly broke the story to supporters of both clubs and to anyone else in the capital interested in reading candid transfer gossip.

Data from Hitwise reported in Time magazine last October.

Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. [The trends appear to indicate that 18-24 year olds] are too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.

You go to a party. Meet a girl. Photos are taken. They end up on Facebook. Girl's brothers issue Fatwa. Suddenly you've got £20,000 bounty on your head.

"Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground."

As we all know. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook draw predators of their own.

"The police chief of Amity Island tries to protect beachgoers from a great white shark by closing the beach. Tourism is the town's major source of income. The town council must decide whether it is better to protect the livelihoods of their townsfolk. Or the actual lives of a very small percentage of those visiting tourists. The decision to close the beach is overruled. "

Tired of waiting for the social networks to do anything to protect users that might compromise their business, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's bill Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) was introduced in February 2008.

"As the attacks continued, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter."

Bebo has been keen to push its credentials in online safety, including the high-profile appointment of Rachel O'Connell, a forensic psychologist, and her work on a number of industry and government councils.

Perverted-Justice volunteers put profiles on social networking sites as decoys order to collect incriminating evidence against the predators.

"We're going to need a bigger boat"

The sheer scale and complexity of social networks makes it impossible for policing activity to have much of an impact on the problem overall.

The dramas of Amity Island and Social networks both pivot on a conflict of interest. Amity Island and social networks depend on public confidence to ensure profitability. In the absence of any real solutions to defend against predators, their businesses depends on their ability to play down the risks. Policing initiatives and warnings to be careful will never solve the actual problem. But they can help lull users into a sense of security that is good for the business. The real effect of policing initiatives and warnings is to confuse the issue of who is responsible when trouble arises. To cut through the confusion again we only have to ask. Is the individual to blame for attracting the predator? When predators are known to be active, is it okay to promote destinations such as Amity Island or Facebook as safe? By the way, Jaws, the movie and book was inspired by this true story of the Jersey Shore attacks of 1916:

Just got the news through Slashdot. Facebook's been talking about their breakthrough in privacy controls for quite some time. They have an elite team working on it and they are highly motivated to resolve the issue. Its pure business logic. A sense of privacy encourages the free expression and authenticity needed for Facebook to become more effective at targeting ads. So I suppose it was inevitable. And Zuckerberg has been filing patents to beat the band. Here's most of the excerpt from Slashdot:

...but take a gander at the Facebook founder's patent application for Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary to get an idea of what's in the works. After you check boxes on a form to indicate that 'Everyone from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard' can see your profile, Zuckerberg's 'invention' will miraculously display: 'People from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard can see your profile.' How dare Rolling Stone question his inventiveness!"

Ahem. Not exactly the earth shattering advance we've been primed to expect. All kidding aside. I imagine its really only a matter of time.

From here:

The problem that I'm seeing with most of the current social networks is that 90% of the time spent on those social networks is work that is done in order to maintain currency, keep content fresh, and continue building a sprawling network of friends and raise popularity. So, what does that mean? What it boils down to is this: If you are working for your social network instead of your social network working for you, you my friend, are standing on top of a classic MMO-style treadmill grind. I have bobbed in and out of various social networks and there is something that every single one of them had in common: for me to gain any value from that network, I had to go out of my way to perform repetitive, out-of-band tasks just to gain any value from the network. Having been the victim of many a MMO treadmill grind, I recognize an infinite loop of horse poo when I see it, so I bailed. I have yet to find a measurable value in Facebook or any of a dozen other social networks I've played with. At some point, someone is going to get it "right", and there will be a social network that gives us tremendous value without us having to sacrifice for the cause, and all of the apologists using MySpace, Facebook, and the others who don't know they're apologists will flee to the new network in droves.

From today's New York Times

Kids played Dungeons and Dragons in basements instead of socializing. Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self. For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign. We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator� TV show. I mean, so I hear. Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play. This diverse evolution from [Dungeons and Dragons] goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.