On Facebook, if you just want people from work to see a photo, or just your friends, or just family, or only work and friends, or friends and family… how exactly do you do it?
At the moment, you can’t. Facebook is broken.
Applications aren’t the missing key for Facebook. The missing key is a core privacy feature which allows you to categorise people you know into groups and assign privacy permissions based on those groups.
“All of my Friends” and “People in the Bristol network” is far too vague. Specific settings are required.
Today I put a video on Facebook which, really, I only wanted people from work to see. There’s no real reason other people need to see it. But I can’t refine access permissions to anything below “my friends”.
If you work with safe people, this is probably not an issue. But when you bring clients or family into the picture, there’s much more of a need to restrict access based on what sort of friend they are.
This isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, it’s a business priority for Facebook. People will decline friend requests because they don’t want that type of person (usually a boss or client, I imagine) to see what’s on their profile, which means the Facebook social graph isn’t growing like it should/could.
But this isn’t an incurable illness. Facebook has the resources and technical ability to pull this one off with relative ease.
I have worked on something resembling this in the last month, and while it wasn’t as flexible as what I’m describing, it’s not a gigantic technical challenge by any means. Facebook already have most of the stuff to make this happen in place, they just need to extend their code a little bit.
Hopefully, we’ll see it soon. The guys at Facebook are smart. And there’s even been the odd rumour that it’s coming…
I would certainly agree with you, that this would be a very nice feature to have. It should be pointed out, however, that you can “LP” someone (let them only see a Limited Profile), which you can set to not include Photos, Videos, etc.
I totally agree… more and more of my friends have reported that their parents (shock horror!) have joined facebook and have requested to be ‘friends’ with their children… education never prepared us to have to deal with such deeply philosophical ultimatums as ‘Would you like to add your mum as a friend’?
In all seriousness, my friends list is becoming non-descript but contains some very obvious groupings to me such as colleagues, close friends, friends, family, clubs/sports etc. It would be extremely useful to be able to share within my social sub-networks!
Oh and ‘How do you know Mum?’