Publishing To Facebook Subscribers Shouldn’t Make Us Spam Our Friends

I have one major gripe with Facebook’s Subscribe feature: I have to publish to all my friends to reach my Subscribers. In September, Facebook launched Subscribe, its Twitter-esque option that lets people receive the public updates of other users without being their friends. But I don’t publish my articles to my Subscribers who want to read them because I don’t want to spam my friends who aren’t interested in tech news. This same issue is impacting a lot of journalists, public figures, and other content producers, and I believe it’s preventing wider adoption of the Subscribe feature.

I did a feedback session with Facebook about Subscribe soon after it launched, and the company is well aware of the problem. I commend Facebook’s Subscribe team for building an otherwise useful and ambitious product, and for critically thinking about how to solve the issue without opening new spam opportunities. However, today Facebook announced that embeddable “Subscribe to me” buttons are on the way, and I think it needs a to decide on a fix first.

My suggestion? Facebook should allow users to publish to a “Subscribers” friend list that would cause an update to be public, but not appear in the news feeds of friends (as shown in my fake mockup above). Here’s why:

Facebook Currently Doesn’t Support A Core Sharing Use Case

Below are the 3 core categories of content people publish, and who they should be published to:

1. Personal content only fit for friends (“Friends Only” or a smaller Friend List)

2. General interest content that appeals to both friends and Subscribers (“Public”)

3. Specific interest content that appeals to Subscribers, but not necessarily all friends (“Subscribers” and a Friend List of those interested in that topic)

Most public figures that permit Subscribers typically publish publicly about a relatively specific topic that isn’t necessarily of interest to their friends. Journalists about their beat, politicians about politics, technologists about technology. Even celebrities might want to share what they ate for breakfast with their subscribers, but not their friends.

Unfortunately, Subscribe doesn’t support publishing of content category #3 right now. Instead Facebook functions too similarly to a broadcast channel like Twitter.

That’s likely because it’s concerned that if it added a “Subscribers” publishing distribution option, it would allow spammers to relentlessly publish to their Subscribers without having to worry about losing friends. I argue that spammers don’t care if they lose friends and right now are just spamming both. Also, I believe the audience should be free to sort this out — if they’re being spammed, by a friend or someone they’re subscribed to, they should be trusted to dump that person.

How To Fix Subscribe

There are two ways Facebook could implement a separation between friends and Subscribers:

A. Let the publisher decide exactly who receives a specific update

B. Let the audience decide what type of updates they receive from each friend or person they subscribe to

I don’t think B will work. Users would have to classify each of their friends as someone they do or don’t receive public updates from — a chore most wouldn’t undertake. Even then, just because an update is public doesn’t mean it’s necessarily content #3. It could be a general interest update that their friend might find interesting but isn’t something that needs to be kept private.

The only person who knows who an update should go to is the publisher. That’s why Facebook should permit publishers to choose ”Subscribers” in the same way they could previously check boxes to distribute an update to multiple specific friend lists. Other journalists like MG Siegler and public figures like Digi Jeff agree. (If changing the privacy selector back to check boxes from the single selection allowed today isn’t possible, simply offering a “Subscribers Only” option would suffice.)

If “Subscribers” was selected, an update would be public, but only be delivered to the news feeds of their Subscribers. However, publishers could also select additional Friend Lists who would receive that update in their news feeds, or compose a separate update for that Friend List. For example, I could build a Friend List of friends who also happened to be very interested in technology news. Then when I wanted to publish an article I wrote, I could select the “Subscribers” list and the “Tech News Friends” list (or publish to both separately). The update would be publicly visible on my profile, but I wouldn’t have spammed the news feeds of my non-tech news friends with it.

If this solution was implemented, I’d publish a lot more content to my Subscribers. It would allow Facebook to overtake Twitter as the best place to follow public figures. Most importantly, it would improve the user experience by allowing us to share what we want with who we want, without spamming anyone else.

What do you think? Join the public discussion on my Facebook profile.

Facebook Promises To Finally Update Android App To New UI

UPDATE: The new Facebook for Android update is live, review will be coming soon.

Saying that the Facebook app has sucked for a while now would be an understatement. Facebook for Android has been notoriously famous for being a pretty terrible app, almost never delivering notifications on time, and offering a UI that is sub-par compared to other operation system’s applications. However, Facebook has promised to finally update their application to sport the new UI and we are currently waiting on the update. The Facebook Blog uploaded a post that stated all of the improvements, along with a “launching today” close on the post.

The first thing this update will improve on is faster photos. Facebook is claiming photos are 2X faster than previous versions, and now it’s easier to tag and do other nifty things in the app. Secondly, and most importantly, Facebook will update the app to sport the new UI that the iOS and mobile web versions have had for over a month. This means the menu that is above at the main menu will be consistent throughout the rest of the app, offering things like notifications and messages from any place in the app. The new side menu launching from the left will also be on board, and it will pull things nicely together as a new UI for Android users. There is supposed to be notification improvements and various bug fixes as well, and honestly, I’ll have to see it to believe it. There have been many occasions where Facebook launches an unstable update to their Android app, and hopefully this is not a trend they continue to follow. We will keep you updated, and once the update is available, post a review on the new and improved Facebook for Android.

Facebook Zips Up Its Fly

A glitch in Facebook's code briefly let people access private photographs of other members.

The bug was discovered by a member of an online bodybuilding forum.

This led to people accessing personal images belonging to other other members. Even the site's founder and CEO wasn't immune -- Mark Zuckerberg's own profile was soon ransacked, and various private picures of his were posted throughout the Web.

Facebook has reportedly stated that it has found and fixed the bug.

Even so, "It's a big deal," independent security analyst Randy Abrams told TechNewsWorld. "A date in a photo can reveal you're out of the country right now, for example. There are numerous ways that disclosure of confidential information like this can be damaging."

Facebook did not respond to our request for comment for this story.

What Happened

The glitch apparently took advantage of Facebook's mechanism to report inappropriate images. When a Facebook member clicked on the "Report" tag to flag an image on someone else's profile as inappropriate, the site kicked up other photos from that profile, including private photos, so the complainer could determine whether or not they were also inappropriate.

Facebook reportedly blamed the glitch on a recent code push and said the problem only existed for a short time.

The social networking site took the feature offline and has reportedly resolved the problem.

What Might Have Caused the Problem

"Fundamentally, the bug was the result of a failure to apply privacy settings to a public search tool," Abrams stated.

However, it's "par for the course" for bugs to pop up during code changes. The appearance of the glitch doesn't necessarily mean Facebook was slacking off in code testing.

"There are a seemingly infinite number of variables to test for in quality assurance," Abrams pointed out. "It's always the one you never saw coming that becomes the new QA test case."

There Really Is No Privacy, Mark!

Posting photos to online sites is a risky business, whether the site is Facebook, Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Picasa or any other site.

"No matter how private you think your album is, it's one bug or corporate change away from primetime YouTube," Abrams warned.

Further, the owners of the photos share copyright with the sites.

"Google claims irrevocable rights [to your content], while the complexity of Facebook's privacy model makes it difficult for most users to know if their pictures are private, even in the absence of bugs," Abrams said.

Facebook's privacy model "is far too complex to reasonably expect them to prevent serious bugs that compromise privacy in the future," Abrams cautioned. "The question is when, not if."

Dear Federal Trade Commission, Thank You For Not Saving Us From Facebook’s Privacy Changes

The Federal Trade Commission intervened this week to stop Facebook from doing things like making private user information public… back in 2009. Besides being years too late to impact key product decisions, the proposed settlement doesn’t go far in controlling what Facebook can do in the future.

Which is a good thing.

The company has willfully changed its product countless times over the years, ignoring its users, the developers on its platform, its advertisers, privacy advocates, politicians, etc. Facebook protest pages (um), scathing articles, and petitions to quit have pressured Facebook revert back from whatever it was trying to do.

But they’ve all been forgotten, except for stragglers like the FTC case. What remains for most people is a vague sense that Facebook has “privacy issues.” But no one can agree on what they exactly are, and no on really seems to mind, anyway.

Anyway, the site has 800 million users worldwide now, half of whom log in every day. It has gotten most of these users in the past few years precisely because it has gotten more open.

Would the FTC have prevented Facebook from being such an important part of so many people’s lives if it had intervened sooner? It actually could have, when you look at Facebook’s evolution and its results. One of the single biggest issues that the FTC had, for example, was that Facebook had forced friend lists to become public in December of 2009. But those friend lists have made it much easier for all of us to do things like see what our friends are reading when we visit news sites.

The way Facebook has succeeded with users is that it has changed the product based on how it has seen people using it, or how it thinks they’d want to use it. By convincing a closed community of college users to share all of their intimate details, then slowly making key parts of its site more public, it has been able to get all of its users sharing their identities online over the years.

The problem with that plan was that Facebook didn’t always know what it could be or how it could get there. Friend lists, for example, started out private because Facebook didn’t imagine itself becoming the social layer of the internet.

So, until November 2009, Facebook told users that “You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the Privacy page.”

Along with an interface that allowed users to keep any piece of information about yourself private, that term led those who cared to understandably assume that Facebook would not force them to make some information they shared public.

But then it changed the terms that November, and in December required everyone to make their profile name, profile picture, list of friends, current city, gender, networks, and fan pages public. It offered some ways to partially obscure this information, like making it so that your profile didn’t appear in searches, but the main result was still lots of private information becoming public. Facebook fundamentally deceived users in this case, even if it did so for what believed were the right reasons.

A massive outcry followed, focusing on all the horrors that might come (but never really materialized). That triggered what became a key issue in the FTC investigation and, eventually, a main change in the settlement this week.

Facebook now agrees to make all privacy changes to existing products opt-in. “Giving consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers’ express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established,” in the words of the FTC. While it can still make new products and make privacy settings opt-out for those products, Facebook and the FTC clarified to us earlier this week, it’s hard to think of anything the company might do that would be very scary for most users.

In the meantime — the past two years between the product change and the settlement — Facebook has pushed all sorts of new features that take direct advantage of all this public information.

The change around friend lists and that data, in particular, has allowed it to launch the graph API, and the Like buttons and other social plugins that populate the web today. By letting your friends share the fact that they’re friends with you when they join other services, Facebook can make it easier for them to share what they do with you. The Like button requires just a click to let you share something with friends.

It’s hard to know exactly how things would have gone differently if Facebook hadn’t made the changes when it did. Maybe people who keep friend lists private wouldn’t be able to receive shared items from friends? Or maybe everyone who wants to share anything would have to go through some sort of extra sharing approval window?

More broadly, the types of changes the FTC has been pushing could have blocked broader background uses that we take for granted. For example, Facebook now takes the place of a phone book. You can look up anyone you’ve ever met in the world, and you’ll be able to see enough information about them to figure if you’d like to be friends.

If Facebook hadn’t experimented, or if it had listened to criticism and pulled back, or if it had been prevented from making any changes by the FTC or other government bodies, every Facebook user might be a little less informed and more bored today.

The FTC has fair points. Yes, Facebook shouldn’t have misled users about its intentions at some points in the past. No, it shouldn’t have made security errors that at times have let some private data out. Yes, it should try to provide more clarity to users when new changes happen. No, Facebook still shouldn’t have let deleted content be accessible. (Yes, its efforts to explains its changes over the years make for a hilarious read).

But Facebook was right to try to change its product to become somewhat more public. The world has been slowly getting more comfortable with coming online over the last couple decades. Like online payments before it, social data sharing has turned out to be something that people are fundamentally okay doing. If Facebook was going to become a social layer that made every product it touched more valuable, it needed to make some of that social sharing public as well.

Doing something new and different is inherently full of mistakes. There will always be critics. But great results make everything else fade into the background.

So thank you, Federal Trade Commission, thank you for taking nearly two years to tell Facebook how to handle privacy issues that were already over and done with. And thank you for not getting in the way of whatever Facebook is planning to launch next.

The BlackBerry App World release New Facebook for blackberry

The BlackBerry App world release New Facebook for blackberry of great communication boasts. BlackBerry affairs as an individualized digital help with address book, calendar, memo blow up, and project listing capacities. It likewise functions because a movable media musician with back up for music and video replay and camera and video capacities. BlackBerry is mainly recognized for its power to mail and receive (push) online e-mail where mobile net servicing reporting is acquaint, or by wireless connectivity.

BlackBerry phones have a widely adjust of messaging boasts, admitting auto-text, auto-correct, text anticipation, back up for a lot of languages, keyboard crosscuts, and advertize notifications for a lot of arrangements admitting email, New Facebook for blackberry, Twitter, Myspace, and eBay; advertize instant electronic messaging via BlackBerry Messenger. It likewise has a light-emitting diode light indicant that gives notice the owner of newly unread messages. Completely information on the phone is compacted by BlackBerry Internet servicing (BIS). The BlackBerry Internet servicing is a push technology arrangement, which immediately calls back messages and a New Facebook for blackberry from mail hosts to your BlackBerry twist in actual- time. BIS is purveyed trough a network bearer to enable the capacity of the boasts that it provides. With the BIS advertize technology, all communicating theories are provided with appliance and approachability is ascertained to the maximum. It’s a quite economical process of communicating with your associates who likewise own a New Facebook for blackberry . Exactly like in the case of applying the BlackBerry courier or more popularly chased because BBM, you acquire messages from your BBM friends in an crying, with no traffic and alleviate of utilize is quite much assured. Emailing is fair like texting with the push email technology provided along the BlackBerry Internet Service. Encountering completely your email updates in real- time is as accessible as really chatting with your friends across your desktop pc. Pair it up with the Blackberry policy to secure your New Facebook for blackberry from the almost common mishaps and doubts is the following wise step to accept at one time you are applying this technology to its greatest