Is facebook on the wane?

lukey · Sat 31 Dec, 2011 12.14

The problem with Facebook is always the interaction between its privacy settings and UI. Five years ago, the news feed freaked people out not because it changed the low-level visibility of their stuff, but now it turned their every interaction into a 'story', pushing everything to everyone with no nuance. The difference between having your phone number listed publicly in the phonebook and having it rained down on the world as confetti, if you will.

Fast forward to now and the timeline is the same problem. Nothing has really changed, it's really just a glorified infinite scroll. I rather like the presentation of it, but now I can jump back four years and immediately cringe at the shite I was talking about. Anyone with enough determination could've seen these things, but now anyone with a fleeting interest can. Now yes, I can put a blanket silencer on it, but again we're back to a total lack of nuance. Actually, this is something I'm working on at the moment - the idea of privacy policies for content 'decaying', and whether you can model and predict, essentially, the half-life of a privacy setting.

Anyhoo...I don't see use of Facebook being on the wane. It's hard to gauge because it constantly tries to redefine itself from being a fairly static website to a platform for apps to scrape social data to an aggregator of every action one takes online, while it's still so (relatively) immature that people are still redefining how they actually use it, from mere profile stalking, to inane "just ate a sandwich lol" pish, to "here, have unfettered access to my music listening habits, please do something fun with it". At best, I can only really say it's changing, and absorbing a wider range of interactions, and I'm a little apprehensive about it. I'm not against there being a sort of 'social layer' to the web, but this would be the only de facto web infrastructure in the hands of a single company I can think of, and, well, that's a bit gash.

Alexia · Tue 31 Jan, 2012 18.35

Hide Ticker button has appeared.

Now if only an "Remove Ticker" option would appear....

Philip · Tue 31 Jan, 2012 18.51

Why does everyone hate the ticker? I love the ticker. Instant updates on what people are posting on, liking, sharing, something that would take a while to appear in the news feed.

Alexia · Tue 31 Jan, 2012 19.13

Philip wrote:Why does everyone hate the ticker? I love the ticker. Instant updates on what people are posting on, liking, sharing, something that would take a while to appear in the news feed.

Cos I'm not interested in my friends' friends. Nor do I want EVERY comment, like, photo upload appearing; I prefer the Johnny-come-lately approach of reviewing it when I want to.

all new Phil · Tue 31 Jan, 2012 23.09

Don't look at it then.

Inspector Sands · Tue 07 Feb, 2012 09.42

Have they just moved them or has Facebook dropped the ability to group your friends into categories? I had mine into groups like 'work' 'friends of friends' etc and then had different restrictions for some..... but I can't see ant reference to them now.

marksi wrote:...but it seems to be stupidly complicated to get those privacy settings right, and there's no easy way to check that you've got them right.

There used to be a facility to see your profile as it is seen by someone else. Again I can't find that now either

lukey · Tue 07 Feb, 2012 09.48

Inspector Sands wrote:Have they just moved them or has Facebook dropped the ability to group your friends into categories? I had mine into groups like 'work' 'friends of friends' etc and then had different restrictions for some..... but I can't see ant reference to them now.

You can still manage friend lists (it's been de-emphasised from their sidebar a bit) and set privacy settings on a per-list basis.

Inspector Sands · Tue 07 Feb, 2012 10.56

Thanks, and thanks to this morning's Metro I've found where the 'View as' function has gone - next to 'activity log'

marksi · Tue 07 Feb, 2012 16.47

The "view as..." doesn't really help because:

Let's say I am friends with Gavin. And Gavin is friends with Nick, but I am not.

Gavin clicks on a picture that Nick has posted, and "likes" it and comments on it.

*I THINK* that if Nick has his posts set to "Friends of Friends", that will end up on my main profile news feed, because I am friends with Gavin. However if Nick has his posts set to "Friends only" then it won't.

Therefore... I don't know where my "like" or comments will end up and who will see them, because that depends on the settings of the person whose post I comment on!

Or am I wrong?

Nick Harvey · Tue 07 Feb, 2012 17.08

No, as far as I can work out, you're right.

That's unless they changed it yet again seven minutes ago.

I'm just set to 'Friends'. As far as I know there are only three settings now, Public, Friends or Custom. Unless you can produce 'Friends of Friends' somewhere within Custom.

Edit: Oh yes, you can.

Gavin Scott · Tue 07 Feb, 2012 17.46

marksi wrote:The "view as..." doesn't really help because:

Let's say I am friends with Gavin. And Gavin is friends with Nick, but I am not.

Gavin clicks on a picture that Nick has posted, and "likes" it and comments on it.

*I THINK* that if Nick has his posts set to "Friends of Friends", that will end up on my main profile news feed, because I am friends with Gavin. However if Nick has his posts set to "Friends only" then it won't.

Therefore... I don't know where my "like" or comments will end up and who will see them, because that depends on the settings of the person whose post I comment on!

Or am I wrong?

Nick's privacy settings take priority over mine in this example. If he's open to all (or friends of friends) then he would see your likes. If he's set to friends only then you wouldn't.

We could test this.