Soon you will be able to get a first hand-look at the new Facebook privacy enhancements that were announced today. And you will discover that not much has changed.
They are just playing ball so that you will stick around to support this burgeoning social search engine that you are helping them to create.
A Quick Review of the New Privacy Standards
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Set your privacy and forget it – You will be able to set your privacy standards to one setting – across the board, and Facebook will promise to apply that setting to any future enhancements.
Shut off Instant Personalization - You can shut-off the Instant Personalization feature that automatically shares your personal data and that of your friends with sites such as Pandora and Yelp, which are the beta partners with Facebook on this recent endeavor.
Be Searchable on Facebook – Depending upon how you set your privacy, you will either be searchable by either just friends, by friends of friends, or by everyone.
The Paradox of Privacy for Your Small Business
Ah, now everyone gets to learn a valuable lesson about search. You can have your privacy, but that means you can then only be found by a limited group of people – your friends that already know you and love you. If you are working to grow your small business with Facebook, having your privacy works against the growth of your business.
You see, this isn't just about privacy, certainly not as far as Facebook is concerned. This is about search.
Why Search Matters
I like to think that if Facebook could speak as one person, this monster would have one thing to say to all 400 million of us: You complete me!
We all helped to create what will prove to be THE search engine of choice on this social Web. That's why Facebook has presented an approach for managing privacy that makes it easier for everyone to stick around. CEO Mark Zuckerberg refers to this method of sorting out your privacy in terms of buckets.
With just a couple clicks you will soon be able to dial in the appropriate level of privacy – or risk, into tidy little buckets:
- Everyone
- Friends of Friends
- Custom
Why did Facebook create this? Because many people are too lazy to take the time to really consider how they want their privacy to be managed. Facebook initially tried to manage this for you by using defaults that favored the Open Graph, as they call it.
What this really favored was creating the most robust social search engine possible – for them. After the outrage by many who were surprised by this unexpected move, Facebook has decided to allow you to dial it down a bit – at your own risk, which of course works to keep your business private – and less findable by your future customers.
This move is a small price for Facebook to pay to keep you in the fold. Facebook's social monster is still growing and feeding, and it needs to eat more of us to develop into the Frankenstein monster that they envision for dominating the highly lucrative search of this increasingly social Web.
What Really Matters
All things considered, not much has really changed. You have always been in control. That's right Dorothy, all you had to do to protect your privacy was to click those ruby slippers and get the heck off of Facebook!
The problem is Facebook is a lot like junk food. You enjoy it, even though you know it's not good for you. But what the heck, you are having such a good time that you rationalize a little here and there can't possibly matter. Then after a while you get fat and lazy and the monster takes control of you.
Successful small business owners know they cannot control any number of market conditions, but they can control how they run their business. Taking control of your own destiny is essential.
In that regard, determining how to navigate this particular situation is just another day at the office.
Take some time, Facebook is giving you a couple of weeks to ponder your decision.
If want to study this further, here's a video of Mark Zuckerberg announcing the new privacy changes.
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There was restriction from the beginning, since facebook allows only 5000 friends to be added to your profile. But in the field of promoting business quality is far crucial than quantity and I believe that few targeted friends on facebook are much helpful than having large number of followers. Now I wonder how these privacy restrictions can help in improving further the quality of promoting on facebook.
Thank you Jeff for sharing this post.
Saudfani – Thank you. Indeed that 5,000 figure got some people upset in the beginning, but most are finding now that they would rather have a small – but higher quality following.
As we move into real-time search, which Facebook certainly has their eye on, I suspect people will be more focused on the quality i.e. real friends.
Jeff