EyeSee

Everyone has been super concerned about privacy within Facebook for a long time. So here’s the latest scoop on this.

In other words you do have the choice of making content available to friend, friends of friends and everyone.

What these changes mean for you

• You can now control who can see every post you share, from status updates to photo albums.
• Regional networks (like London or Australia) have been removed.
• A common set of information for all users is now publicly available.
• Facebook-enhanced applications and websites now have access to a limited set of information when you use and interact with them: your publicly available information and information you’ve made visible to Everyone.
• No changes whatsoever to ads on Facebook. We do not give—and have never given—anyone’s data or personally identifiable information to advertisers.

From your home page, you will be sent through a transition tool that will help you select your new privacy settings. Remember, you’ll always be able to change your privacy settings from the Privacy page.

So you can customize who sees which post. So take the time to customize your settings based on what you are comfortable with. As always do give Facebook your feedback so that they can improve on this.

Further details are provided in Facebook’s privacy guide.

Although Facebook popularity was exploding globally they were still in start-up mode as a company, with negative cash flow.They had to borrow to expand and maintain their data centers, which cost about $25 million to run.

Sheryl Sandberg came on board about a year ago and things began to take a turn. Facebook was no longer a company run by a bunch of kids but had a COO that was there to turn Facebook into a very profitable business.

So who is Sheryl Sandberg anyway? She is a Harvard graduate who was the V.P. of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.  I think that about sums it up.

Facebook has finally announced that it is cash flow positive this quarter which means that they are no longer relying on investors to fund their development and growth but are generating revenue themselves.

How are they getting this revenue as Facebook is still FREE. This revenue comes via their ad network, Facebook Ads.

I have tried this a few times and have to say that I quite like it. I have the ability to target very specifically to age, gender, geographic location, profession and more. They have gone up in price from 23cents per click to 43 cents per click, however still much cheaper than most forms of advertising out there. They offer analytics and tools to track various campaigns, goal setting and much more.

The virtual gifts are still a high runner, $75Million this year.

So if you are a traditional business and your target market is on Facebook then it’s worth your while to participate there and run a few ads.

What makes a social network great asides from the obvious are the little touches that are added to make updating you status easy. In the age of less is more it’s nice to have these add-ons.

Ok I am going to cut to the chase, it’s the @mentions or new tagging feature from Facebook. If you are a regular Twitter user you are very familiar with the @username, as a way of replying to the people you are having a conversation with.

This feature is somewhat similar to Twitter however it’s not only user name based but contextual as well. Here’s an example of what I am talking about. Say I want to @ a particular friend who’s name begins with A.

Click on the wall tab and type the @ followed by the word you want to use, in this case it’s @a.

A drop down window will be opened with all the relevant info. related to a.  i.e. Pages, groups, events etc.. that contain a. Keep typing the rest of the word until you find the relevant item.

Click on the item. There you have it. It’s very easy.

So if you have been to an event and want to comment on it use the @mentions feature. If you have a comment for a number of friends then this is a great feature to use as it saves you writing on multiple walls at the same time.

Go ahead it and get @crazy in Facebook.

Facebook now has something called Facebook Lite. The way to access this is by clicking on the linkhttp://lite.facebook.com/.

It’s certainly a work in progress however it’s quite a calming feeling when you use this as most of the applications, updates, requests etc. are not there. All the bells and whistles have been stripped out. So if you like this then use it.

Here’s what it looks like so far.

Top menu bar for Lite has the Profile, Events, Inbox, Settings, Logout and Search.

Compared to the regular Facebook which has Home, Profile, Frneids, Inbox, UserName, Settings, Logoug and Search.

The top bar for Lite has Write, Post Photos, Post Video.

Compared to the regular Facebook which has Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes, Video, Yearbook, + (for additional tabs)

The Lite side bar looks like this.

There is an Ad asking you to invite 2 other friends to try it out.

There are no menu items at the bottom, and all the other side bar stuff is gone.

So why a Facebook and a Facebook Lite? Time will tell as to where they want to go with this. Till then if you find it all too confusing then use Facebook Lite.

It  seems that wherever you turn these days there is news of gloom and doom.  So many thousands lost their job this month, these companies are going out of business, national unemployment rate rises.

To escape it all, you login to facebook to catchup with friends.  Well that too has been a real challenge due to identity theft scams.  Then came the wife learns of  divorce via facebook status.

So here’s something fun for you and your friends for Valentine’s.

<3 – with a space after will give you…. go try this out

there’s more some fun applications for everyone, single, relationship or jut plain old friendship

• what color is your heart?
• what kind of smile do you have?
• wine anyone
• introduce Me
• Are you Interested?
• speed date
• private photo gallery
• sparkey
• meet new people
• Flower gifts

For the more adventurous here’’s one and another ……

Go ahead and try these out whatever your status.  Have a Happy Valentine’s.