I think the big fear is that people think unless you uncheck this “Allow Indexing” checkbox then absolutely everything you post on Facebook will now be available to search engines. From my understanding that’s just not the case.

If you read the text under the settings it says (emphasis added by me):

“Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone“

The only thing Facebook is going to allow to be indexed is that information that’s publicly available from their site already, and anything you’ve set to be available to “Everyone” in your new privacy settings that you can configure for different things: i.e., photos, status updates, links, friends, About me, etc.

I’d recommend going into your Settings > Privacy > Profile Information and specifically decide what you want to share and with whom.

It’s also interesting everyone that narrows this down to Facebook is allowing “Google” to have all this information and they’re “indexing” everything. Folks, they’re opening it up to ALL search engines, not just Google and “indexing” isn’t EVIL, it’s what search engines do to collect the information on the web to populate all those search results you’re looking for online.

I’m not sure about the “Facebook Search Results” section, I’ll have to read up on that one.

Post from: EveryJoe

Facebook’s New Privacy Settings and Search

Speaking with a friend of mine though and they were amazed at how easy it was for someone to find everything they’d said on twitter. Now, let’s clarify, unless you specifically have all of your updates protected, everything you tweet is going into the public timeline for ANYONE to read, not just those who follow you. People need to be aware of this.

Here’s the challenge though, even if you individually block someone from subscribing to your updates or "following" you, they can still follow you on your public timeline and see what you’re saying. Yes, this activity would be very stalker-ish and it’s annoying we have to worry about it, but it is what it is.

I normally am a little irritated when I’m followed by someone that has their updates protected as I believe twitter should be an open forum to some degree. This issue though has me really re-thinking how I feel about that. I would hate to exclude anyone that might have a reason to really be hiding from other individuals from using the service, but I’m not sure what the best answer is for everyone.

Perhaps it’s just education and let people know about the opportunities and risks. Perhaps you have an online persona like I do in "bnpositive", although it wouldn’t be hard to link the too in my case, there’s nothing specifically in my twitter profile that ties that account to my real name.

What do you think is the solution? Were you aware of the issue? Very interested in hearing your feedback and comments.

Image: Edited image from sxc.hu

Post from: EveryJoe

Improved Privacy Needed on Twitter

You can follow the instructions below that were given to me by Papa Roux on Facebook. He operates a cajun restaurant here in Indianapolis, but he’s serving up more than great food with this tip.

If it’s not enough reason jus because they’re annoying, here’s an article from PC World about the other reason these quizzes are doing more than just giving you a bit of an insight to your friends on Facebook. There is a cost with The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes.

What he shares isn’t too complex but it’s also not as immediately obvious as you would expect either.

If you look at your Facebook homepage you’ll see sets of small buttons that are the different types of updates you’ll see in your updates main page.

On the left-hand side you’ll see something similar to what appears on my sidebar. I’ve got a lot of groups specified, but you get the idea.

Just click and drag the items to the top of the list you are most interested in seeing in your stream. I prefer Status Updates, and photos and Links.

My least preferred item at the moment are all those quizzes, which appear as part of the news feed updates. I’ve moved this to the bottom of my list. So far it’s helped bury those quizzes out of view even more.

If you’ve got more tips on how to get rid of what you don’t want on you Facebook stream, be sure and let us know in the comments.

Post from: EveryJoe

Facebook Quizzes Be Banned!

If you imagine all the different groups of your contacts as an extending circle of influence similar to what would be shown in the image below.

Facebook Circles of Contacts

Let’s think about your closest friends or family being the center circle, and extend from there the groups of people you have less contact or influence with in your personal life.

You may want to send an update to your friends and family, that’s not seen or available to your old high school friends, or perhaps more importantly those clients and co-workers that you’ve found on Facebook.

As far as I know, there’s no way to accomplish this currently on Facebook. In some instances your circles may not nicely overlap.

It’s this occasion where I think you should have the ability uncheck different groups of your friends to not be informed of an update or be able to see it as visible. By default all of your updates would go to everyone as the functionality exists now.

But on those occasions where you would like to exclude certain groups, you could uncheck their group for being included in the update. Also, if an update was marked private in one of these instances, any response by that group of friends would also only be viewable by the people you’ve identified as being able to see that update. So someone’s response to your “private” update should not appear on their wall.

Post from: EveryJoe

Managing Facebook Information