Dear Facebook,

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. What happened to you? What’s happened to us? When I first started seeing you, I was still in college. You promised me exclusivity, and in return I shared important information and intriguing facts about me that hardly anyone knew at the time, including the fact that I truly believe “The Great Gatsby” and “Confessions of a Shopaholic” are two of the greatest books of all time.

After some time of that, you began sneaking around. My friends told me that you were flirting with the idea of letting high school students join us. What?!? These were high school students. I thought you and I were beyond that. But you let high school students on, and I eventually became used to that fact. I still loved you, no matter how you treated me.

Once I got used to that (and almost forgot about it, actually), you threw another curveball my way. I was told that you were going to see anyone over the age of 13. Anyone. What happened to the exclusivity? I felt like you were changing, yet I had stayed the same. I tried to break up with you then, but you lured me back. We had so many mutual friends, and you always managed to come up in conversations. How could I not stay away from you?

Then you began messing with your appearance. I originally loved your simplicity – that was the best part about you. But then you introduced applications and became cluttered. I began to get invitations to events that I would never, ever want to attend. And you began sharing my information. I had to ensure – constantly – that my security settings were always set on private rather than the default public options. I began to get tired of you.

And now, here we are. At the beginning of the year, you basically told me that you didn’t care about my feelings or security. You’re completely different from when I first met you – which is okay, because change is a part of life. But I can’t help but think that your defiance is just a knee-jerk reaction to the other cutie in the room, Twitter. And you’re going about it all wrong, Facebook. You were my first love. But of course I’m going to see Twitter. Why shouldn’t I? You so clearly don’t care about me.

So I’ve made the harsh decision of keeping some of my private information from you. I first went up to my “Settings” tab, located at the top right hand side of my screen:

I then hit the “Privacy” section, which is the second to the last selection on the Settings page:

From there, I first clicked on “Profile Information”:

And there I was able to select who could see what about me. I changed the default settings from “Everyone” to “Only Friends.”

Sadly, I couldn’t stop there. I had to go back and go to “Contact Information” and repeat the same exercise, changing it so that not “Everyone” can see how to contact me. (I actually usually recommend that people keep SOME information public, but considering how accessible I am online, I keep my Facebook fairly private.)

Then, I had to go back AGAIN and click “Applications and Websites.” There, I had to select what my friends could share about me – because even if I choose not to have my information shared with everyone, that doesn’t mean that my friends feel the same way:

Facebook, I didn’t want to have to do this, but it’s done. And I’m very happy with Twitter and LinkedIn. But I do miss the way things were, and I dream about the way things could be once again if you take some time to go back to your roots. But until things change, I feel like it’s important for people to be aware of your thoughts on our privacy, how they have changed over the years, and what they can do to protect their privacy and security if they so desire.

Because now? You’ve set yourself up to become another MySpace. All it’s going to take is another college student with too much free time and a predilection for privacy, and Facebook could easily be a thing of the past.

Much love,

Carly

Was my letter too harsh? Completely off the mark? Do you agree with Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg when he says that people don’t care about privacy anymore? And how do you protect your privacy online? Let me know in the comments!

]]> http://www.oneillcommunications.com/2010/01/openlettertofacebook/feed/ 0 http://www.oneillcommunications.com/2010/01/best-new-features-of-linkedin/ http://www.oneillcommunications.com/2010/01/best-new-features-of-linkedin/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:35:35 +0000 ociadmin http://oneillcommunications.com/?p=1770 LinkedIn, the popular social network for businesses, has gone through some big changes recently. It’s still one of the only social networks to go against Facebook and hold it’s own. While many of LinkedIn’s recent improvements bare strikingly similar properties to features on Facebook, some of them do not and are quite innovative. We’re going to look at seven of my favorite recent new features in this article. All of these were implemented within the last quarter. Pretty impressive!

1. Integration with Microsoft Outlook

With the release of Microsoft Office 2010 Outlook will have LinkedIn integrated into it. Users will be able to keep up with their Connections’ Network Updates, email their Connections, and manage their inbox all from within Microsoft Outlook. Users will also be given a quick link to add or invite people to their LinkedIn network. This way, when your new prospect emails you, you can quickly add them to your LinkedIn account with a simple click. I know not everyone will use LinkedIn in Outlook, but it will certainly bring in a lot of new users who just don’t remember to visit the website or never got the hang of it. Now that it’s integrated into something we all do, it’ll be easier for it to become a habit for a lot of us.

2. Follow In Groups

If you’re like me you want to keep your Connections as sincere as possible and only add those people who you actually know or have worked with. But sometimes you find some great thinker or similar spirits in some of the groups you participate in. While it wouldn’t really make sense to invite them into your network you still want to be able to follow them easily. Enter the Follow In Group feature that allows you to follow the activities of other users within the groups you both belong to. Sounds like a perfect compromise.

3. Faceted Search

LinkedIn greatly updated their search feature by adding 8 facets to each search you perform. Now your results can be narrowed down by Current Company, Past Company, Location, Relationship, Industry, School, Groups and Profile Language. If something still can’t be found with all of that, then it’s probably not there anyway.

4. New Navigation System

This one was sorely needed. The team at LinkedIn move most of the navigation to a horizontal, drop down menu across the top. While drop down menus aren’t always the best solution, this one is very reliable and nicely organized. The best part is that freed up a lot of real estate lower on the page which then allowed the important information on the page to move up as well and make it easier to find. Great solution.

5. Syncing with Twitter

Everyone who’s anyone started syncing with Twitter last year and LinkedIn was no different. However, they orchestrated the syncing in a pretty smart way. I don’t know about you but I don’t feel confident that 100% of my tweets belong on a forum as professional as the profile of my business identity, but a lot of them are. To solve this, they created a super simple way to filter what’s posted from Twitter and what’s not. Once you’ve got the account connected you can chose to turn on a filter that only posts from Twitter to LinkedIn if the tweet contains “#in”. Easy to remember and effective.

6. Developer Network

Now this is very similar to Facebook opening up it’s platform for developers, but I still think it’s a great think for LinkedIn and anyone who uses it. We saw how quickly we started seeing nearly all website allowing users to connect to their site through Facebook and reporting back their activity. Hopefully something similar will be done with LinkedIn as well as some surprising, new ways of using it, too. This one is still pretty new so it’s something to watch in the future.

7. The New iPhone App

The biggest news from LinkedIn for me was the complete redesign of their iPhone app. Their previous one was fine but there wasn’t much to it and not much you could do. In the new one you can search, mark profiles as favorites, change your Network Update and view others’, send and receive messages. You’ve also got a fully functional address book and allows you to transfer contact information between two people when they bump their phones. Pretty sweet. Download it for your phone here.