Recently, my wife saw some posts on the wall of some “not-so-nice” relatives, who were obvious newbs to the facebook world. Follow this rule… Don’t post anything if you dont want *everyone* to see it. The only thing you should rely on being private is a message (which is really like an email). And even then, treat that with a bit of caution. Your trusted friend might walk away from their computer and leave themselves logged into facebook one day, at the mercy of their roomate or sibling. Hijacked!

Your wall on facebook is PUBLIC. People in your network (sometimes this means city) can see your wall. This means that you shouldn’t write wall posts about how many donuts your Aunt Sally ate this weekend. When she finds and friends you (and she will find and friend you), you’ll regret it. Be the smart one. Wait until Aunt Sally joins Facebook, friends you, and then go read her wall posts. I guarantee there will be some good stuff up there if she hasn’t read this yet

P.S. Facebook’s help is really great. I recommend you read Facebook’s help privacy section.

Tagging- tagging is a way for people to classify items (online, usually) based on words they associate with them. You might see a picture of casey and tag it “dog, cute, puppy, lab…”. You might bookmark a website about facebook (on delicious.com or such) and say it is “goodread, news, technology, etc). It’s referred to (by groundswell) as the “folksonomy” of the internet and allows you to find information based on your own classification, plus teaches the computers and other users how to classify that information.

Facebook tagging – facebook lets you tag your photos with the names of actual people who are part of facebook. They have a lot of features surrounding this. One such feature is that if you go to my profile ( on facebook), you will see that there are >100 photos of me. I may have submitted about 20 of them, but I was “tagged” in other people’s photos. This means there is no need for me to have my own copy of their photos of me, plus others dont have to dig through my photos to see me. The more you tag yourself, the more people will be able to see you in those photos.

I, personally, use facebook photo tagging as a way for people to stay current with what I am doing…. example… After uploading my photos from halloween, I tagged myself and my wife in the photos. That resulted in a “news feed” item in facebook that said “Ben tagged himself in this photo”. All of my friends get that “news feed item” and can then go see that photo. Having done this, many of my friends commented on those photos and told me how ridiculous my costume looked. It’s my way of telling people what I am up to, without actually having to do anything.

Many of facebooks principles are based on the “beacon” approach. I am active on facebook, so that whoever cares can visit my page to see what I have been up to since I am broadcasting it like a beacon! It sure beats sending all of my friends photos after every party.