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Facebook Privacy: 101

2010-03-02T11:28:00Z

UPDATE: I updated a couple of the images and wording to coincide with the newest Facebook design. Let me know if anything is still “off”.

I get a lot of questions about how to use Facebook’s new (ish) privacy features so I thought I’d go through a quick 101 tutorial on settings things up and using them effectively. I’ll try and keep this as simple and quick as possible but I will also be covering all you really need to know about keeping your Facebook profile and the information you post on it safe.

Where do we start? We need to create some friends Lists. A friends List on Facebook is just a collection of friends for your eyes only. Your friends will never know what lists they are in (unless you tell them) so they’re just for you. If you really WANT to go all out and create that “Assholes” list, feel free without worrying about a thing. Follow the pictures and this should go swimmingly.

Select Account -> Edit Friends from the top menu of Facebook

Here is your friends page! This page will recommend friends to you as well as give you various methods of organizing them. We want to view ALL of our friends right now..

Select Friends from the left side under Lists

There we go. Now we have all of our friends to look at. Let’s start organizing them by creating a new list…

Select the button labeled “Create New List”

You’ll get a nice popup that should be easy to understand. It’s asking for a name for this new list and it gives you all your friends to select from already. You can scroll down this list or type in the names of people who you know you want to put in this list. Don’t worry about missing someone. Once you create a list, you can always add and remove people from it at any time.

Name the list and start adding some friends

Like I said, once a list is created, you can modify it any time. This friend I have selected below is already in 1 of my lists, but I want to add her to my Friends list as well. I click the “1 List” button that appears to the right of her and I can see all of my lists. Just select another list and you’ll see a check-mark next to it. Now this person is in 2 of my lists! If you want to remove someone from a list, just click a list that already has a check-mark and the person will be removed.

Select another friend and add or remove them from another list

Now that we have a List of friends, we can venture into actually securing our profile. Your profile is pretty much everything about you on Facebook. It includes your information like your birthday and relationship status. It also includes your wall posts, photo albums you’ve uploaded and pictures that others have tagged of you. Facebook recently dumbed this page down quite a bit to make it much easier to set the privacy exactly as you want it.

Select Account -> Privacy Settings

You can explore the other options after this tutorial. I’ll only be covering the Profile Information section. The other sections let you control who can contact you, who can search for you, and what applications have access to your information.

Select Profile Information

You now see about a dozen different items that can be set. There’s a brief description of each item so you know what your controlling. Take your time here. There’s no rush at all. This is your “life”, by the way. Getting your profile to appear exactly as you want it to, to exactly who you want it to is not a 30 second job.

You can tailor every item quite a bit but for the sake of this tutorial, I’ll give you all my personal example which is a “Limited Profile” list. You can call it whatever you like, but I suggest everyone have one. Facebook used to actually have something called “Limited Profile” so I just stuck with that.

Another quick note on the Limited Profile. A while back when Facebook changed some privacy settings, the old “Limited Profile” list lost all it’s “limited-ness”. So make sure you take a look at these settings and set that up again!

Ok, back on track. Let’s select the very first item. It should be called “About Me”

You have a few options here..

Everyone will show off this information to anyone and their mothers. Nothing will be safe with this information. No one has to be your friend to see this. You probably don’t want this for your About Me section, but there are places where you might not care so much. For instance, everyone can see my birthday on Facebook because I really don’t care if they do.

Friends of Friends. The next step down in security. This will make sure not just anyone can see this information and limit it to only friends of your friends. Pretty self explanatory.

Only Friends is also quite self explanatory. Only your friends will be able to see this section of your profile. This might be how you want to do things for parts of your profile, but I feel it’s still a bit too loose for your About Me section.

Custom. Now this is what we want to see. Detailed controls! Custom opens up another option that we’ll be using.

Select Custom

There are now two sections here. I’d suggest you keep your first option set as “Only Friends” to keep this information only visible to people who you accept as a friend. But now you can specify a friend or a friend list to exclude from this section. This is where I put my Limited Profile group.

Now you can Save Settings and proceed to the next item. Set up each of these the way you want based on what your comfortable with. You can lock down or loosen up to your hearts content. A few sections you might want to look at are listed below for you.

Personal Info. This is the section where you put down all the movies, and music and interests you have.

Family and Relationship. You family and relationship status should be listed here.

Photos and Videos of Me. This would be all the things your friends are tagging you in. Since you don’t have a lot of control (aside from removing the tag) over what your friends tag of you, I’d concentrate on keeping this limited to closer friends.

Photo Albums. This is the only different setting on the page. It takes you to a list of all your photo albums and allows you to set privacy settings for each of them individually.

Posts By Me. Anything you write on your wall/home page. Links. Photos. Notes. Whatever. You can actually keep this a little looser if you want because right after this, you’re going to learn how to control each and every post you make.

Allow Friends to Post on my Wall. I’m sure there are a couple reasons you wouldn’t want ANY of your friends to be able to write on your wall. But I can’t think of any right now.

Posts by Friends. A better idea than not letting friends write on your wall at all, is controlling who can see what they DO write!

Play around with all the settings here! No really. Go! I’ll wait..

All done? A quick tip for you, now, is the “Preview My Profile…” button on the top of the Profile Information Privacy page. This button is very magical in that it lets you view your profile through the eyes of someone else. You can see how all your hard work tweaking profile settings has paid off by seeing exactly how someone else will see your profile!

Hit the “Preview My Profile…” button on the top of this page and enter the name of a friend who you shouldn’t see a certain section
(maybe someone from your Limited Profile list)

We’re going to cover 1 more topic here and then you’re ready for the real world! This is a newer feature that Facebook just released a month or so back. It let’s you have fine-grained control over who sees things you post on Facebook. Head back to your home page and we can post a status to only a certain group of friends.

Click the “lock” icon next to the Share button and you’ll have some options on who will see this post

These options should all look familiar to you so let’s just jump straight into Custom again

This time, instead of selecting “Only Friends” like we did in our Profile Information, we’re going to select Specific People. This will let us type the name of specific friends or lists of friends that we want to see this post. Very straight forward. You may want to include a name or a list in the “Hide This From” section if you have some friends in 2 lists. For example, you want to share with your “People From Work” list, but you wish to hide it from your “Managers From Work” list. This is only necessary if the “Managers From Work” also reside in your “People From Work” list.

Go ahead and save those settings and share your post! You’ll see a tiny little lock sandwiched between the time of the post and the comment link. If you hover over this, it will display who can see this post.

I think that about covers it! Once you understand how the privacy controls work on Facebook, they really aren’t that hard to master. With a little practice, you should be an expert at controlling who sees what on your Facebook page. Now go have fun!

P.S. Another quick tip that I learned while actually writing this tutorial is that the “Preview My Profile..” link from the Profile Information page mentioned earlier actually works in previewing who can see wall posts as well. You can use this to make sure that post you just shared isn’t visible by your “Managers From Work”.

What I'm Looking Forward To In 2010..

2009-12-31T21:04:00Z

The new year is hours away. Even though I know time is relative and that flipping a calendar to a new year doesn’t actually mean anything in the grand sceme of things, for some reason there’s comfort in it. Here’s a few of the things I’m looking forward to in 2010..

Movies/TV: The Lovely Bones, Kick-Ass, Harry Potter, Lost, Alice in Wonderland, Social Network, Always Sunny In Philadelphia..

Technology: New iPhone, Apple Tablet (Not that I’ll get one, just to see what it’s all about), CES..

Goals: Knock out the few iPhone app ideas I have floating around in my head right now, Think of more ideas and knock those out, Get some freelancing started, Move.

Short list, I know.. Just threw this together real quick off the top of my head. I really am looking forward to the new year, though. I hope everyone’s deployments into 2010 goes swimmingly and I hope everyone stays safe. Happy New Year!

Baby-Daddy Generator Preview added to iPregnancyTest

2009-11-20T20:59:00Z

An update to iPregnancyTest was just approved by apple that includes a couple of tweaks here and there. There’s a one time notice about iPregnancyTest’s support for Facebook that reminds you to log in so we can use your Facebook friends as a basis for the Baby-Daddy Generator. Speaking of the Baby-Daddy Generator, there’s also a new “Baby-Daddy Generator Preview” feature that allows you to see who our “super scientific tests” have determined to be the Baby-Daddy before launching Mail or asking for your permission to post a feed story to Facebook. Update your apps now or, if your don’t already own iPregnancyTest, pick it up from the App Store now.

Why Apple's Support Wins

2009-11-15T16:36:00Z

My iPhone started acting up a couple of days ago. Any time the screen went blank (either via auto-lock or if I manually hit the lock switch) it took about 30 seconds and the iPhone would just shut itself off. If I turned off auto-lock, the phone stayed on for as long as it could (battery dependent, of course). It also only seemed to have this problem when running on battery power. Very strange problem, indeed. I restored my phone and set it up as a new phone and thought that would clear it right up. It definitely did not.

Next step, set up an appointment at the Genius bar nearby so I could stop there before work that evening. I walked in and talked to a very nice Apple Genius. I explained my problem to him and he only really had one option that he could try on his end. He was going to “restore” the firmware in case something went wrong there. Alas, it was not looking good for me. Until the king gentleman said to me “Well.. your phone appears to be a couple months out of warranty…”. I had gotten my iPhone 3G the day it came out, so I already knew this. But then he went on to say ”.. but, we’re going to cover it for you. How about you just consider this a lucky day for you?”.

I was ecstatic! As much as I kind of want a 3GS, I figured I could make due with what I had until the NEW new iPhone came out later next year, but this plan was going to be thrown out the window if I had to subsidize another phone through AT&T as soon as they would let me. So now I should be able to make due with my iPhone 3G for another 7 months or so. Thank you Apple!

Which begs the question. With all the talk about iPhone killers lately, and all blackberry vs. android vs. iPhone debates, I can’t foresee a similar situation happening when you take your G1 or Droid or Whichever Blackberry 10 Billion that you have in after the warranty has expired and your experiencing some strange behavior. If you know anyone who has done this, I’d love to hear about it. I know it happens with much greater frequency with Apple products, though.

So, again, Thank you, Apple.

Poke A Keith adds OpenFeint support!

2009-11-12T20:45:00Z

An update to Poke A Keith was pushed threw by Apple yesterday that includes OpenFeint support to add online achievements and leaderboards! There’s even a chatroom so you can talk with other Poke A Keith players or anyone on the OpenFeint network! Leaderboards let you compare your scores in a variety of categories with your OpenFeint friends as well as the world! It’s all available now so go get it!

Secret Browser is now available!

2009-11-12T20:41:00Z

Until today, the only options you had for private web browsing were either kind of shotty and thrown together really quick or much more expensive than anyone should pay for such a thing. Secret Browser was approved and released on the App Store today to solve those problems! I made sure to try and squash all the annoyances of other private browsers out there now as well as threw a very reasonable price tag on it. How does FREE sound? Head over to the App Store now and download Secret Browser. Let me know what you think!

P.S. You can also go ahead and follow @secretbrowser on twitter or just follow my twitter list for all of my apps!

My Twitter List!

2009-11-11T07:30:00Z

Twitter just updated not too long ago with their new Lists feature and I thought it would make a great opportunity to create my own list of my iPhone apps and whatever other applications I create that could warrant a Twitter account. So check out my new Twitter List at http://twitter.com/swemoney/apps and follow the hell out of it!

Update: I changed the name of the list to just “apps” so it’s much easier to remember..

Homebrew DVR commercial skip idea

2009-09-18T07:48:00Z

This just popped into my head while thinking about how shittastic my Comcast DVR is. Made me think about homebrew/open source DVR software. I have no experience at all with this and hell, this might even already exist, but wouldn’t it be cool if your DVR connects to a ‘commercial skip server’ that’s crowd sourced or maintained somehow. Basically, all it would store are timestamps for when commercials start and stop for the shows. If a show has commercial skip information when you go to watch your program, it could just automatically skip through the commercials and if it doesn’t, there could be an option for you to ‘mark’ where the commercials start and stop.. and after so many DVR’s mark a program, it gets verified and automatically skips commercials from then on. Just thought that would be cool to have in a DVR. What do you think?

Better iPhone Notifications (again)

2009-09-08T18:28:00Z

I recently wrote about how the iPhone needs a better system for sending and viewing push notifications. My proposed system wasn’t a stretch at all, but it would take a little bit more work.. What if we got a very incremental update to the whole system first which would give Apple time to flesh out a great system for 4.0? My idea is dead simple (and I’m sure it’s been mentioned and thought about many times already).. Push Notifications seem to carry a lot of similarities to that of a Text Message.. Why doesn’t the iPhone just treat them as such and create a new Text Message in the Messages app for each app that’s sending push notifications? That’s all I got. Maybe include a little arrow on the right of each message to launch that app and see the notification in more detail. That’s all I got. I think it would be an easy to implement solution for the short term while they work on that huge location aware social steam thing we all read about quite a while ago.

iPhone Needs Better Notifications!

2009-09-03T21:18:00Z

Now that the MLB At Bat! 2009 app has added push notifications and my Cubbies are going to have to pull off one hell of a September in order to have a chance for the playoffs, I finally have an application that will be sending my iPhone a few push notifications every day about the results of the teams I need to lose. I’ve heard plenty of reports about how shitty the notifications on the iPhone are, but I’ve never really experienced any problems. So I started thinking about how they could be better and the first thing I thought about was the new Facebook 3.0 notifications. What if the iPhone used a system like this?

On the lock screen, there could be two options. One of them could be a very short and sweet kind of thing. Maybe even just a large icon showing that you have 5 new notifications or something. It would probably make sense that even in this view, more information is shown if you only have 1 or 2 notifications. Then, there should be a more detailed view that would take up the full screen and show an icon of the app that sent the notification as well as a short synopsis of the notification. It should be scrollable even when the phone is locked but it shouldn’t be possible to activate anything until you unlock the phone.

Then when the phone is unlocked is where I think Apple could take a hint from Facebook on this one. When you have a notification, the icons on the springboard might nudge up a little bit to make room for a bar on the bottom of the screen that shows how many notifications you have. When you touch the bar, it expands to show all your notifications and lets you interact with them however you wish. Then just add a ‘read’ status to all the notifications that would allow the bar to stay present until your completely done reading through all your notifications.

That’s really all I got. I’m sure Apple is already working on something for 3.5 or 4.0 or something of the iPhone OS. What does anyone else think about this idea?

Poke A Keith now OFFICIALLY available!

2009-06-30T08:23:00Z

Poke A Keith was released about 2 months ago but was very quickly removed from sale (by myself) after a tiny oversight was found by me that would have caused some major problems in the future. It was a very quick fix. Took me about 2 minutes to fix it and I was ready to submit the update. While waiting for this update to be approved, I worked on some more features and bug fixes until I figured I’d just submit this new update instead. I did this about 2 more times after this too. Today marks the RE-release of Poke A Keith for good! The best part about the re-release is that it’s FREE! Lots has been added since I originally released and I’m quite happy with this as an initial version. I’ll be adding more in the near future. Go download Poke A Keith from the App Store now for your iPhone or iPod Touch!

Dead Simple to learn. Very, very hard to master!

Great score sheets give you a LOT of ways to compete with your friends!

Share your scores (Or maybe you’d like the word, brag?) with your friends on Facebook or via email.

“Achievement” scores are there for you to discover.

Tons of AWESOMENESS is always included!

iPregnancyTest v1.2.0 released!

2009-06-29T23:43:00Z

Apple was finally kind enough to approve iPregnancyTest v1.2.0 and it’s now live on the App Store. There was a tiny discrepancy with a new button image I used that Apple didn’t think should be used in the way I did, but all is well now and you can go ahead and update/download it now! What’s new?

Facebook Support! All my apps are getting the Facebook treatment. The result sharing now offers the ability to share via Facebook instead of just email. We’ll also use your Facebook friends with the Baby-Daddy Generator and the new Baby-Daddy Picker.

Baby-Daddy Picker! Before, you would need to type in a friend’s name if you didn’t want to use the Baby-Daddy Generator, but now we supply a list for your to pick from. If your logged in to Facebook, it’ll show you all your Facebook friend’s names. If your not, you’ll see names from your Address Book. You can still type a name if you want, but the option is there for you now!

Misc. Bug Fixes.

it’s a good update! So download and start sharing on Facebook now!

Pros & Cons on AppGiveaway.com

2009-06-28T17:28:00Z

Pros & Cons is available on AppGiveaway.com now! You can sign up there and possibly win yourself a free code for Pros & Cons!

Pros & Cons v1.1.0 FINALLY approved!

2009-06-26T17:54:00Z

Pros & Cons was finally approved by Apple! It’s been over 2 weeks and the update is finally live. Lots of polish and a couple new features here..

Facebook Support added. You can now share your list ideas with your friends and see how they feel about those results. A great way to get a ‘second opinion’ on some tricky lists.

When you add a new list, it automatically asks you to name the list. This feature was added by just me observing some other people using the app and it seems pretty nature that you name a list right away from the beginning.

A new options pane inside the list gives you a couple of options for each list. It also gives you a more detailed look at the ‘score’ for the list so if you like more than just a ‘yes, no, maybe’ answer, you can see exactly how much better 1 side is than the other.

Some polish and under the hood fixes.

I’m pretty excited about this update, so download it now and start sharing on Facebook!

iPregnancyTest found on Wall-O-Apps

2009-06-09T20:00:00Z

During WWDC, Apple had on display a ‘wall-o-apps’. It was a large wall of iPhone app icons matched by color. Each time an app was downloaded, that app’s icon pulsated or something. It looked very neat and you can read more about it here. On that same page, I grabbed the image above and believe I have found iPregnancyTest sitting pretty on the wall-o-apps! Yay!