I’ve been spending a wee bit of time on Facebook trying to work out if the posts from the programme blog are being imported onto the Wall of the Social Change page. It’s a great feature which allows staff on the programme to post information, updates, news and views on the blog which then feeds automatically to the Facebook page without them ever having to visit Facebook – or even have an account. Well, it’s a great feature in theory! In practice, it either fails to import or can take up to three weeks to bring external posts in. There’s a lot of complaint about this by users of Facebook with various emails and group discussions. But to no avail. Facebook are just not interested in getting this feature to work as it should. And from a business perspective you can see why. Simply, they want Facebook users to generate their online updates from within Facebook. Encouraging it to be a platform aggregating content from external sites is simply not a priority for the business plan.

As with all these things though there is a workaround solution. I’ve just installed a Facebook application called RSS Graffiti which seems to do the same thing (import posts from the blog) and which actually works. It’s important that it does so since the value of the Facebook update is that it should be (almost) immediate. If anyone has another suggestion that could improve on this do let me know.

Last year, in the unit ‘Home Page to Tweet: Networked Society and Social Change’, we talked a great deal about the nature of the Facebook ‘friend’ and the value of strong and weak ties in instituting social and personal change: the friend of your friend’s friend can actually influence your health and even make you happy/sad! We realised that one of the problems with Facebook is that it doesn’t differentiate between different types of friend. I’m sure nobody would claim that all their Facebook friends had the same ‘status’ as friends. Yet differentiating between them in sharing ideas, images, videos etc. is complicated/near impossible.  It might be OK when ‘friends’ are limited to a social circle deriving from school, or even university. But when you want to share some things with friends, some things with work colleagues and other things with absolutely everybody, it gets difficult.  One solution I’ve just come across suggested by Niley Patel involves creating three simple lists: people I trust, people I don’t know well, and limited profile. Here’s how Niley explains the difference between them:

People I trust: These are your main dudes and ladies, your closest friends. You’re only going to put 10-15 people on this one, max. My friend Will’s version of this list is named Inner Circle; mine is named True Blue. It’s the VIP list, so treat it accordingly — people have to earn their spots.

People I don’t know well: Virtually everyone else you know goes on this list. It’s the one for friends from class, or the people you only see at parties, or friends of friends. Remember, you really don’t know that many people well — anyone you wouldn’t trust to keep those pictures of you on spring break in Mexico under wraps while you run for Congress goes on this list.

Limited Profile: This is everyone you probably have to be friends with but that you don’t really want seeing your profile. Your boss, your little cousin, your mother. You’re going to lock this list down tight.

He then goes on to give a step by step guide to set this up on your own profile.

I think it’s a sensible system to take more control over what you share and how you share it. The more that Facebook becomes a window onto our online worlds, the more we need to take control and manage what can be seen through that window.