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Pimp my privacy

So, back in August I wrote about Facebookand the perils of prodigious sociability - that the “one giant bucket for all your friends” nature of the site was a limiting and messy experience. At the time, I sketched out a possible workaround: making custom groups which users can then sort their “friends” into, and set permissions on a per-group basis.

My solution involved using the existing “groups” functionality to manage subsets of friends, but better still would be to have the potential for grouping people within the mega list, right?

What next? MySpace for Dummies?Well, the first bit has happened:

Facebook has now added the ability to group your friends into custom groups. You can name each group and create as many groups as you like.

The ability to assign permissions on a per-group basis isn’t there yet, which is weird - without that possibility, there’s not a huge amount of point to grouping your friends, apart from making the list more manageable. But it looks like it’s on the way, at least…

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Category: Society & Media, Web

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2 Responses

  1. Ignorminious says:

    Meg Pickard - Shaping the course of the internet, one blog post at a time!

  2. William T says:

    Re: your photo caption, is that not tautology?
    (Speaks he with only 2 “friends” on FB. Sorry.)

By way of explanation...

This is an individual post, which may not be very recent. For the latest stuff on meish dot org, please visit the main page.

By the way, I'm female. It doesn't have much impact on what I write about, or how I write, but I thought I'd point it out because so many people who link to this site seem to assume I'm male.

The clue's in the name: Meg. Like all those other female Megs.

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What's all this, then?

This is a personal site, created and curated continuously since early 2000 by Meg Pickard, a creative geek, passionate photographer, anthropologist and web experience /community /social media specialist, who works for The Guardian & lives in London, UK.
 
The site includes a blog - a personal and evolving collection of links, opinions, thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and musings - as well as a variety of other projects. It is also a place to aggregate some of the author's distributed web activity, like photos, links and music.
 
More info about this site and its author.

Important note #1

This is a personal site. The contents and opinions contained within don't necessarily reflect those of my employer, family, or cat. They think for themselves (though mostly about tuna, in at least one case), and so do I.

Important note #2

Since the overwhelming majority of content on this site is historical, it should be regarded in light of the context in which it was originally published, and not as indicative or revealing of current perspectives, preferences or experience.

Important note #3

While I work and spend a lot of time thinking and talking about social media, participatory technologies and community development strategies, the vast majority of content on this site is not about that.

This personal site isn't about anything, except the perpetual unfolding of one person's experience, and the perspectives, observations and opinions that involves and inspires.

You still here?

Oh.