一塊地 Piece of Land

Facebook has just changed its design again on 5 Feb 2010, a Friday. I've been busy with school and work these days so haven't found a proper time to review the critics of this new design. However, I would like to quickly post 2 things which I consider FB to reveal a greater control of user's privacy. 
First, status update could be the source of the suggestion/sponsored link:
I posted "the netwar of Burma (Dinitz's) is exciting! nothing in the world is as simple as it seems!" in my status update. And 9 hours later when I logged in FB again I saw the page "Support the Monk's Protest in Burma" at the right side bar of my Web page.

It might sound silly but I've been bothered by Facebook's new privacy settings for quite some time. As a nerve wreck and a faithful FB user, I constantly check my privacy settings and filter my friend list. Starting this month, I started to notice some weird occasions on FB, so I went back to check again and again my privacy settings and couldn't find the old version of "News Feed and Wall" privacy setting. As a result, I searched in 'Facebook Help' and received tons of useless links. My past experience told me that FB is at least open about users' freedom to set up a Group or Page to criticize how awful FB is, therefore, I searched again and found several oppositional voices, the bring back "News Feed and Wall" privacy settings page, for instance.
It's nice to know I am not the only victim, or the only one who is pissed off by FB's brutal changes. On the one hand, FB shows their goodwill by showing the new 'Publisher' feature which allows users to define the privacy of your content on a per-post base (notice the little 'lock' icon?); on the other hand, FB is playing dirty work by eliminating users' choices to manage other features. As a keen FB observer, the most intolerable change for me is that I can no longer control the exact content I wish to share to my friends. For instance, the comments, including likes, I made on my friend's status updates or photos are all shown in News feed (not to mention the real-time Live Feed).
I am still figuring out how to manage my privacy from FB's recent changes, meanwhile, I feel the very complicated settings are trying to discourage my loyalty to FB. I have to admit though, there are several times when FB made major changes I started complaining and then eventually I got used to it. I reckon FB understands this rule of thumb: the audience has extremely short-term memory in the age of information overflow.

In Facebook, you can report a fake profile, offensive photos, and abusive groups or pages. More than that, when the 'like' buttoms are everywhere in your friend's page,  there are 'report' buttoms everywhere in Facebook groups and pages. Once you send out a report, Facebook will evaluate if there is a violation against its terms and conditions and then delete the item for you. This process is based on the company's own judgement: offensive, abusive, obscene, etc.   
 
People start to question whether they are being censored by Facebook; up to date there are a number of 396 Facebook groups related to  'Facebook censorship'. Social networking site are a double sword. On the one hand it provides users around the world with a platform to (re)connect and share, on the other hand the open environment involves with a high level of noises. Internet censorship is therefore applied owing to the request from government, interest groups, and stake holders. When Facebook gradually becomes an influential media in our time, self-censorship is a way to protect its business operation, which contradicts its purpose for a “more open and connected world. In his article of “Evasion Tactics,” Nart Villeneuve points out how internet control can challenge people’s freedom of express:   

At last Friday’s eComm, Google Wave gave us a short product demo and a brief introduction about its Federation Architecture. Currently Google Wave is still at a preview stage and only a limited number of Google users are invited for hand-on testing. What Google Wave sells is its real-time communication collaboration. There are several technical features I found innovative about Google’s demo, but what seems the most inspirational to me is Google’s potential to collect online users’ real identity, which would be treated as a huge leap forward for Google’s business map.

As a keen Facebook fan of Greenpeace, I am pleased to see how Greenpeace makes a huge leap of digital campaigns on Facebook. The Greenpeace Photo Contest is by far the only environmental campaign that connects Facebook community and the action for climate change- you need to change your profile photo in order to submit your photo for contest. 
 

Just as Dave Winer suggessted Tweeter's next advantage should be the making of news, last Friday Facebook launched Live Feed as a rivers of news which allows users to receive updates in a real-time chronological order. I didn't get a clue at the very beginning, when I logged on my Facebook and found out that new function. At first I thought it's a redundancy to have both News Feed and Live Feed, nevertheless, after comparion I suddenly realized how much information I had skipped in the old version News Feed because of its algorithm.