Facebook Connect, Dynamic Privacy, & Dynamic Publishing
I trekked down to Palo Alto last night with Mark Silva to attended the SDForum and hear Josh Elman present on Facebook Connect.
Josh is the Program Manager for Facebook Connect and according to Silva, presented pretty much the same information that Dave Morin did at F8, which I unfortunately missed.
Josh did a great job of covering the following three areas that Facebook is focusing on with the upcoming launch of FC; Identity, Friends, & Feed. And since this has already generated plenty of posts in the blogosphere since F8, I’ll focus on what captured my attention early on: Dynamic Privacy and the resulting idea of Dynamic Publishing.
As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow them, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up to date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external site. And the users can control who can see what pieces of their information - the same rules that they set on Facebook can be applied through your site too using our dynamic privacy controls.
I like the feature and think its pretty much the price of entry if Facebook wants people to use the service. What good is it to use my Facebook to populate other sites with my social net if I have to go update each site individually when I make changes? After all, the social net is by nature dynamic and if I can’t find time to complete my profiles on these other sites, when am I going to find time to go back and manually update them?
That said however, I think their Dynamic Privacy is missing a potentially key counterpart: Dynamic Publishing.
I’m going to define Dynamic Privacy as the ability for users to define and filter who receives specific feeds by lists.
Facebook has already rolled out news feed filters that allow users to define how they want to consume feeds from their friends. Here is a sampling of some of the filters that I have in place: “Family,” “Social Media Thought Leaders,” “Real Branding,” & “Motorcyclists.”
What I’d like to see with Dynamic Privacy is the ability to create publishing filters/lists that allow me to post status updates that apply only to my co-workers, wax eloquent (well as eloquent as I get) about a favorite ride or a new bike to my fellow motorcycle enthusiasts, or just grump to my closest friends that spent the whole weekend working on the house instead of out enjoying the great weather.
Privacy is becoming a big issue in social media circles. Questions of “how much do I share” and “to whom” are cropping up on Twitter, in Friendfeed, and around the water cooler. I think the natural reaction is to either keep Facebook narrowly personal and only invite people you know well into your circle, or to broaden it professionally and limit the amount of personal information you share.
I’ve opted for the second, but technologically I don’t see any reason why we can’t have both. Here is hoping that Josh, Dave, and others at Facebook are listening…
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jreyes