Aaron's Thoughts

Yesterday Facebook launched a whole bunch of new tools for web developers with the idea being that outside sites can taylor better to you, the user, with more information about you. Indeed, this has always been the idea; a website could look different, suggest different things, and show you what your friends have been up to on the site. To do this, facebook gives developers simple things that show up if you are already signed in to facebook: the "like" button, comments boxes, and list of friends who liked or commented on that site.

Beyond that, we, the web developers, have to ask you to log in with those blue facebook buttons. When we set up that login feature, we get to decide how much from your facebook account you are authorizing us to see.

SO... read VERY carefully these kinds of dialog boxes, they tell you what the developer has requested access to:

Great, so YOU know to be careful... but do your friends? That's not a trivial question, because with that same "Allow" button above users can approve third party sites to access the profile, photos, statuses, comments, likes, friends, groups, notes of all their friends! In fact, here is the full list, see the column called "Friends permissions": http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions

As a result, everyone you are currently friends with have a lot of power to share YOUR information with websites outside facebook -- a little scary if you ask me.

I encourage everyone to review the following new privacy permissions by following these instructions:

1) Log in to Facebook and go to "Account", then "Privacy Settings"

2) Click on "Applications and Websites"

3) Find the section "What your friends can share about you" and click the "Edit Settings" button.

4) On this screen you should decide what your friends can share about you to third party sites. THINK ABOUT THIS CAREFULLY.

Ultimately, you are the owner of your content so be careful what you post about yourself. Third party websites can store your data once they have it, so deleting stuff you don't want about you on facebook doesn't delete it from existence.

Keep in mind, this is new, so we have to see how things go. The notion that a website can personalize to you means that it needs some info. AND, facebook is leading the way towards a single sign on for all sites so that you don't have to recycle those 3 passwords all over the web which is a big security issue. My two cents though is that these particular privacy settings are too burried for how important they are.

In my new job I'm fascilitating a small team to decide on some strategy and deisgn of our overall social / mobile platform to reduce weight. It seems all the discussions come back to this new model of real world points (think Farmville, Mafia Wars, Nike+, or many common games). We came across the following video which really brings it home. I think this presentation is both interesting and scary -- the last 8 minutes are the best. So the question I have is how does Farmville succeed in getting so many people to work for points and can we leverage that for positive behavior change? Jesse Schell imagines a world where your points are automatic, but can we get the same result if there are a few steps involved to report your accomplishments and the positive result beyond the points is just better health and fitness? I guess we'll see...