As I’m sure many people have read, Facebook recently made changes to their privacy policies that have got people’s knickers in a knot, and understandably so.  The long and short of what Facebook is trying to achieve is to monetize your content you create via search engine traffic.

On the web traffic is currency and Facebook has a lot of it.  The problem that is inherent with the concept of monetizing Facebook’s traffic is how their user base was built.  Facebook didn’t become this omnipresent internet juggernaut overnight.  They built up from a small site targeted toward university networking to the megalith of a site we know today.  And they did this by building a walled garden community.

Stuff that happened on Facebook is inherently public, but it wasn’t necessarily of public record.  You could always prune back your walled garden, delete content and nobody would be the wiser.  This isn’t the case with the rest of the internet.  Things can get indexed in Google almost as soon as it’s published.  Once it’s published it can be cached by numerous sites, creating a backup should you ever decide to delete your content.  All the images you post with your content end up in Google or Bing image search results.  I find I get a pretty large amount of traffic to my blog looking for images, so I know there is definite value in the hoard of images on Facebook.

Facebook users signed up to use the service under the impression that the site was essentially a personal social network.  This wasn’t a site where you had a public profile, online aliases or anything else to obscure your identity.  The web had long been built on a foundation of obscuring facts about yourself for the sake of personal privacy.  Facebook essentially allowed you to let your guard down and reconnect with family, old friends and acquaintances.  You could share email addresses and phone numbers with your network knowing prying eyes shouldn’t be able to access this information.  You could share pictures of parties or vacations knowing that it is being shared with people you actually know and not online strangers.

The biggest issue at hand here is what I view as a betrayal of Facebook’s 350 million users. The service has essentially reached a crossroads.  They have a very large userbase, but more then likely their growth will have plateaued, given everyone’s Moms/Dads/Aunts/Uncles/Grandparents are now using the service.  Now they’ve reached the point of saturation, the rules are changing.  No longer does Facebook want to be a closed website, they want to take all these notes, wall posts, photos and shared links that you have posted onto the site over the years and turn them into avenues to generate revenue.

The reality of this situation is that it’s not people like myself that are going to get screwed by these changes, it’s the less computer savvy that Facebook has spent years courting.  I went through yesterday and locked down my profile so that there is next to nothing showing up on my profile page.  I have it so that my page doesn’t appear in search engine results.  I had to individually change the permissions of each photo album to be friends only.  You can no longer see who my friends are anymore.  Here’s an article on how to secure your Facebook profile.

I wrote this article mainly to make friends aware of what is actually going on with the new changes.  Log into Facebook and make sure your information is secure.  If you previously hadn’t bothered with your privacy settings it is entirely possible that the new changes may leave certain personal information exposed.

I recently had someone call me out about using essentially Twittering too much on Facebook. I have my Twitter account linked, so that it will publish items as status updates on my Facebook account. To tell you the truth, I was almost shocked it took that long for someone to freak out about it. I do pair down the Twitter noise by excluding @ replies, but I hadn’t accounted for retweets though.

The part that surprised me was the people quickly jumping to my defense on the matter. It just shows the people who are passively lurking, and by extension reading and enjoying the content I pass along. Initially I felt bad about having annoyed one of my Facebook friends and looked to shape up my ways. But as one of my friends pointed out, he could choose to hide my updates and that be the end of it.

The part that got me thinking about this little exchange is the ramifications for Facebook users as things begin to change after Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed. FriendFeed is all about social media aggregation. How many uninitiated users will suffer from data overload as FriendFeed becomes one with Facebook? I guess only time will tell.