Understanding Facebook's Open Graph security for first graders

Here is the thing when considering sharing your stuff with your "friends" it's important to be able to distinguish between close ones and acquaintances. Once your mom joined facebook it became a very public forum. So you make changes or stick with it. I can see why the knee jerk reaction to the Open Graph but it seems to me facebook is making changes and listening while trying to grow their thing. Remember there was a time that your address and phone number were in a big thick book unless you paid not to be included or have your number listed. So what is the difference here? If you transmitted over a CB radio anybody could respond.

So what if you give a little more info? Don't you want custimized solutions for the things you like so they automatically display for you? A interesting example of the Open Graph change is if your boss is your friend on FB and you like a song on Pandora or article on CNN and they happen to be on the site with Open Graph enabled they will be able to see you like it or shared it if you choose to have the info made available. This is when knowing more about your settings is important. Again, it's important to know that if you read it and don't physically click the "LIKE" button then nobody will know.

Granted would be nice if you were allowed to editorialize why you liked something but alas that's what twitter and FB are for when you share with your friends in the first place. The NYT via scobleizer pointed out from public Q&A with a FB exec that the way Pandora is using the concept opens up even more discovery of music but I digress. What if you don't want your friends to know you like The Bare Naked Ladies(I don't btw)?

Well one option that is gathering momentum is to quit facebook all together on May 31st. but that would be just like quitting smoking or worse yet television no? What are you going to go to Amazon to a buy or download a book with all this new time on your hands and what do you ignore the reviews? How cool would it be if the people you trust helped you make a selection instead of a complete stranger.

So what if I still want to communicate with friends virtually but don't want to give marketers more access than I am comfortable with? Well there is diaspora.com for that issue which is open source project that is currently collecting funding to keep your private info in and advertisers out. We'll see how this goes. The world does run on advertising whether we like it or not it's a question are people willing to pay more?

But do watch what you say or a drunk Zuckerman may delete your FB account if he does not like what you say!

Frequently Asked Facebook Security Questions:
If you need help with your setting check out this graph on NYT
How is the Open Graph supposed to work with my favorite sites?
How do I delete my facebook account permanently?

Interesting Fact: The Facebook Privacy Policy is currently longer than the Constitution of the United States.
When is the official quit facebook day?

You decide.

Facebook updates their insight profile analytics

If you have a "public profile" as a Artist, Brand or organization on Facebook and if you click view more and then view insights a whole bunch of new stats will come-up that are much like your basic web site analytics but now you can see the age demographics broken down by how many wall posts, comments, sex and like flags. You need some action on your page for the whole display to work by real users other than just yourself. I think the bar is low but definitely needs to be recent so you can see weekly metrics according to FB. The old insights page was ok but in an effort to encourage self managed advertising this tool was destined to evolve and it has.

The idea seems to be geared to give you the controls to spend money to promote your public profile. I had no clue this was here but then again I was not paying that much attention. Then again ignoring my millions of fans would be bad especially if you have access to them all in one place! This whole marketing ploy is starting to make sense just when everybody is getting ready to jump the shark to tumblr, blip and twitter. I'm still a fan because the masses seem pretty happy and it's simple to participate and not as cluttered as that myspace of a eyesore. I just need to figure out the meaning of post quality score and I'm also digging into the active fans stat and see what that is about. If anything this info will just reconfirm some of the info you might already have know beyond the very high-level info like number of fans. This gives your fans "activity". Lets see how we do over the next months as we prepare the slow wire and eastern anchors to play some shows this summer. Now if Last.fm, which I am a huge fan of as band litmus test, or if the big black box known as myspace did this we would have a real competitive landscape and give the artists more power.

We're also giving Sonic Bids a test drive over at the HeadPhone Music HQ. I've never been too keen to fork out money to get noticed so that is the only thing that is keeping me on the fence. A open commerce market model might be better for the little guys but sonic bids does aggregate your last.fm and myspace friend counter which is a good start but the google buzz tool they include is pretty insignificant as it contains a bunch of unspecific noise. Now if they can tie the user interactions into video plays and song/video plays this will all be rocking info to have. The only thing it does not do is help you write good songs and make the folks listen and like your music. That's the hard part about marketing music ain't it?

Sample some Headphone Music Tracks:
Crossed Wires by The Slow Wire
Release the Dogs by Eastern Anchors
Bradley Wake-Up By Aviso'Hara from Our Lady of the Highway