New(ish) Facebook Publisher

This is a clip from an earlier show from June, when Facebook first launched its beta version of “Publisher”. From the way the press release was worded and then interpreted by various major publications at that time, it LOOKED like all Facebook users, no matter their privacy settings, would have their default privacy set to “everyone” and that all shared items would be completely public.

Apparently this wasn’t true because Facebook HQ publicly stated that the beta only affected those who already had their default as “everyone”, and that if you had any other default privacy setting that wouldn’t change. In other words, this beta affected only those Facebook users who had set their privacy setting as “everyone”, meaning everyone could see their profile, not just “friends and networks” or “friends only”.

With the new Publisher, you could control who views which types of items you publish, so not everyone sees everything. Here is the original article with amendments from the Facebook blog.

That’s all very fascinating except for one thing…last time I posted a status message, one of the people I’d excluded from seeing my status message saw it. So there’s definitely room for improvement in this feature. The idea is stellar, however. And opens the door to possibilities that are much closer to the way we actually interact in life. We don’t necessarily tell everyone everything. Certain things we tell our parents, certain things we tell our coworkers, certain things we tell our closest friends. So a tool which enables this kind of selective filtering really takes the internet one step closer to a level of human interactivity. We’ll just have to wait and see how it unfolds…

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