So last week Facebook posted this neat little piece to their blog about the public Facebook status update. Yes, you read that right. The gist of it is that those users out there who have set their status privacy to “Everyone” will see your status updates. This post states: “if you have access to this beta version, every time you publish content into your stream you are able to control which people can access that specific piece of content.”
Most of the uproar, as you can see per comments, is that users don’t want to have to select who will see their status update, each time a status update is made. In that way, it seems a little similar to email and reply all: make sure you don’t reply all when your really mean to just reply. But it seems this intial uproar was before Facebook qualified its post to note the following:
The beta is only open to people who already chose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone.” For those people, the default for sharing from the Publisher will be the same. If you have your default privacy set to anything else—such as “Friends and Networks” or “Friends Only”—you are not part of this beta.
You think FB would have learned from previous privacy issue announcement debacles, like the few months ago TOS incident, in which they own all your content, or wanted to (if I recall, they revised the TOS after outcry and shaming). Of the 200 million plus users today, so many of them already get upset about various privacy issues, although controls do exist. (It’s on my to-do list to invoke some further FB lockdown.) Will the bulk of these users realize that they have set their status updates to “everyone” and realize the consequences? Surely, yes, now with the post we are all clear about what Facebook is doing, theoretically. But in practice, would some unintentional “everyone” posting be the nail in the coffin, driving users away from this platform? In other words, has Facebook set up the opportunity for too many people to finally foil themselves and run away? This game of connect the dots about my public persona may just speed up.
I can’t imagine wanting to post a Facebook status update as public for everyone and if I had done so by mistake, oh the horror. With Twitter, I post to Tweetdeck and usually autopost to Twitter as well, although it’s a more tech-oriented tweet for which I receive ridicule. But creating a status update precisely for Facebook – I’d like the post to stay there. So argh, argh, argh, argh. There’s just one and only one, Facebook status update, for you.
