Facebook

I am of course only larking around. I love and adore Facebook, just like everyone else. However, I have been thinking about a few Facebook-related things that might or might not be causes for concern and worry.

1) Facebook is now allowing feeds of some content to be posted outside of Facebook
You can now get a ‘feed’ of your friends updates. I’m not talking about the standard ‘News feed’, but RSS feeds like the ones that blogs have. For those who don’t know what feeds are – see the link on the right hand side of this blog entitled ‘what is this orange thing?’. You can find feeds in the right hand column on such pages as your ‘status updates’ page. This means that people can read your Facebook status updates using a site like Bloglines or Google reader. This is good news, but it could be concerning news if your privacy is important. If you have the standard Facebook settings there is now nothing to stop one of your friends publishing your status updates to the world, say in the sidebar of their blog or somewhere. From now on you need to have friends you can trust.

2) Some of the ‘applications’ in Facebook are being rather naughty
See this link on Techcrunch for details. In summary, some of the applications such as ‘My Questions’ and ‘Superwall’ have been engaging in something described as ‘notification fraud’. I have noticed this very thing. The My Questions application makes up questions you don’t know about, and then e-mails friends without you knowing. I was very surprised to find people answering a question I hadn’t asked the other day. It was nice of these people to answer my question of course, but it was worrying that I hadn’t asked it and that the application had contacted them all of a sudden without my knowing. Very very naughty.

3) Er… that’s it
Usually I try to have 3 points to a blog post, like in sermons.

For a Facebook cartoon you can post on your blog and for more information about how Facebook will destroy us all, see my previous post on the subject.