If it feels like it is next to impossible to keep up with all of the changes Facebook seems to implement on a weekly basis, you are definitely not alone. What’s public? What’s private? How do I know who is seeing what I post? Staying on top of all the changes can be an overwhelming task indeed.

One of the many recent tweaks which hasn’t received much coverage is the ability to control who sees your list of friends. Most people don’t seem to mind if the world can see who they’re connected to on Facebook. Then again, is it that they don’t mind or that they didn’t know that they had a choice about it?

Display Your A-List Friends on Your Profile

On each person’s profile page, a sampling of their friends’ photos are displayed. Each time you visit that profile (or if you have the time to refresh the page over and over), you’ll likely see a different set of friends. Did you know that you can choose which friends of yours are displayed when someone visits your profile? What if you wanted to impress everyone by showing off that you’re connected to that famous author who wrote that book, that socialite who keeps getting into trouble and a couple of 20-something CEOs who just sold their companies and are now billionaires? Or, perhaps your priorities are slightly different and all you’d like to do is to be sure that no one visits your page only to see your mom’s photo waiting to greet them?

Here’s how to do this:

1. Navigate to your own profile page. (When logged into Facebook, look over to the right at the top of the page. Click on Profile.)
2. Find your ‘Friends’ section. (On the left side of the page, about half way down.)
3. Click on the small pencil to the right of the word ‘Friends’
4. This will bring up a box where you can edit your settings. You can choose to display 6, 9 or 12 friends. Below this, you can enter specific names of friends you would like to have displayed permanently. If you choose to display 6 friends, you may specifically name up to 6 friends to display (it can also be fewer than 6).
5. Click outside the box. Your settings are saved. Take a look at your profile. You should now see your A-listers’ faces adorning your profile.

Manage Who Can View All Your Friends

Have you ever received a Facebook friend request that left you wondering “Who the heck is Joe Friendalicious and why does he want to be my Facebook friend?” When you view Joe’s profile, you notice that you are both friends with Samantha, leading you to suspect that he might have simply sent friend requests to all of Samantha’s friends. This scenario is only one of many which may lead some people to choose to hide their list of friends from prying eyes.

Not long ago, Facebook removed the ability to hide one’s friends, explaining that allowing users to keep this information private presented an obstacle to the overriding benefit of public sharing – to help users discover friends and news they otherwise might not have seen. Not surprisingly, people were none too happy with this change. After the enormous missteps Facebook has taken lately with respect to privacy and control over our own content and a tidal wave of bad press, they’ve modified the settings and the ability to manage who can see our Friends has returned.

To customize this setting, click on the same pencil in the ‘Friends’ box as described above. This time, click on ‘Change Visibility Settings’ which will bring up a page with numerous options. Included on this page, you will find ‘See my friend list’ as show here:

Clicking on this setting will display the options, as shown. If you’d like to specifically choose which of your friends may or may not see your list, select ‘Customize.’ This will bring up the following box:

As with other privacy settings on Facebook, here you may specifically name people to either include or exclude. This can be a rather cumbersome task if you’ve got more than a handful of Facebook friends. I’m a big fan of using Friends Lists on Facebook to organize and categorize my connections. This significantly simplifies the process for those of us with a relatively large network. Rather than name the individuals who I will permit to see my Facebook friends, I simply add the name of the list.

For example, several of my relatives are connected to me on Facebook. I’ve added them all to a Friends List I cleverly call ‘Family.’ I don’t mind at all if my family members would like to eat up their spare time by viewing all of my friends. (I’m not sure why they’d want to do this, but if they’re dying to know who I know, let it be a mystery no more.) So, rather than enter each of their names into the field above, I simply enter the name of the list that already includes all of their names – Family.

I recognize this can get dicey as the lingo is mighty confusing. The field that contains all of my friends is called a list. The feature I use to organize all of my Facebook friends is called a Friends List, yet they are two completely different things. No worries, though. Let me know in the comments if this tips has worked for you or if you’ve got any questions or suggestions.

Image courtesy of DoctorWho.

Related articles which may interest you:

• New Tool Makes My Email Work Harder and Smarter
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You
• How to: Turn On/Off LinkedIn Notifications
• How-to: View and Organize Fan Pages on Facebook

Just Because It’s New Doesn’t Mean You Need It

I was a rabid frozen yogurt fan when it was all the rage in the 1980s. Then, like all good things I loved, it was sent out to pasture with my severely wide-legged pants, sweaters with shoulder pads and my Lionel Richie records. The period of mourning has long since passed, but imagine my delight to see that frozen yogurt is now *in* once again. I was thrilled to see a new frozen yogurt shop open within walking distance of my home. OK, so it is wildly overpriced, but it’s there and that’s all that matters when I want a fix.

It’s not the same old frozen yogurt shop. It’s shiny new and modern. In fact, the shop is even leveraging social networking tools. I know this because I saw the big “Follow Us on Twitter” sign on the cash register. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the employees are unhelpful, consistently unhelpful. And, now that they’ve armed me with the news that they’re using Twitter, I went online after my last visit to share my thoughts about their level of customer service. Then, I waited; and I waited some more. When I had given up all hope of receiving a reply, I dug a little deeper.

Don’t Use Tools You Don’t Understand

I quickly discovered that the frozen yogurt shop was *on* Twitter, but not *using* Twitter. There is a huge difference. Yes, they had an account on Twitter and it seemed to be active. However, their Twitter account had only been linked to their Facebook fan page, meaning that all of their posts on Facebook were automatically broadcast to Twitter. They were not monitoring Twitter or responding to anyone who had sent them a message.

Using tools to broadcast only, without understanding that this gives your audience the impression that you’ll also be there to answer questions and reply to concerns, is tremendously short-sighted. It seems like the cool thing to do, sure, but does that make it smart? In short, no. In fact, the net result is that the business comes off looking disconnected and less interested in their community than they are in hawking their wares. Bad form all around.

Before jumping in feet first and adopting the latest tool to represent your business or brand, it might be worth your while to take some time to understand the pros and cons in order to determine whether or not it will be a good fit for you.

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Related articles which may interest you:

• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• Helping Kids Stay Safe Online. Is SocialShield the Answer?
• Who Influences You? (Plus, get a free book)
• Happy Holidays! Please Enjoy This Spam
• Facebook Tip: How To Choose Who Can See Your Friends

Remember the old days when we started using email for business communication and to send messages to multiple people simultaneously? Ok, so maybe I’m the only one who remembers when that was a big deal. It seems like eons ago, long before we tweeted and poked to get someone’s attention. Email is so 1990s, right? Not so fast. Email is still as important and relevant as it ever was.

Two primary differences between email then and email now for me are:

• I want shorter emails which get to the point more quickly and clearly
• I want email to work harder for me and make it easier for me to do more than just receive it

I <3 Gmail

I love using Gmail. While it doesn’t have the power to address the first point above (now, there’s an app I’d download in a heartbeat), it definitely goes a long way toward the second.

I’ve added many of its easy-to-add optional features to customize it so that it is a snap to find the email I really want to find (from certain people or addressing particular topics), to automatically file the email I want to look at later (like potential ideas for blog posts) and to automatically delete the email I never want to see (like email newsletters I never signed up for). It is amazing how much work and communication I get done through Facebook and Twitter, but email is still the reliable workhorse it always was. I definitely love my Gmail and when I find something that helps it to become an even richer experience, I’ve got to share it.

I’m kind of into social networking (you may have heard). The good news about this is that I’ve had the chance to get to know some many awesome people I’d never have known otherwise. I’ve built a wide network of people that spans countries, industries, and areas of expertise and interests. It is impossible to keep up with who I know from where. Like many of us, I get emails and invitations to connect from people I may know on one platform, but not another.

This is especially difficult when someone does not use their real name all on platforms, like when Samantha Jones sends me an email asking if I’ll speak at an upcoming conference. I don’t recognize her name because she follows me on Twitter as @bloggymama43. (Real names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

Enter Rapportive. I found out about this tool when I saw Arik Hanson rave about it online. You know all that data you see about how much we care about what our friends recommend? Well, it’s true and Arik is one of those folks I trust to be a reliable filter of what’s valuable and what isn’t. When he gushed, I immediately checked it out to see what I was missing.

OK, already. What does Rapportive do?

When viewing an email in Gmail, one usually sees contextual ads over to the ride side of the screen. Some people are already using ad-blocking applications to get rid of this. I pretty much ignore them. What if that space could be used to display all sorts of useful information about the sender of that email? Would it present more of a 360-degree view of that person if you were also able to see their photo (“Oh yeah, I remember that guy!”), links to find them on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and so on, as well as provide space to jot a few notes about that person (“Don’t even call her, she never calls back.”) to jog your memory later?

I’ve been using this just a few days and have already connected to a few people I know and like on LinkedIn after receiving their email and realizing we weren’t connected online. Anything that helps me connect more efficiently and gives me a quick peek at what the person is up to before I reply to their email is a big win. Do I absolutely need this? No. Is it a huge opportunity to so easily have this information at my fingertips? You bet.

I know you’re going to ask…

• How much information about me will Rapportive display?

It only displays what is already public.

• Can I edit what Rapportive displays about me?

Absolutely. Since it is pulling information from more than one source, you may find that some of it is repetitive or outdated.

• How does it know so much about each person? Are they spies?

I don’t know these guys personally, so to say they aren’t spies would be pure conjecture, however, their privacy pledge states…

Where does Rapportive get its data from?

We combine information from several sources; at the moment, these are Google Profiles,Gravatar, Plancast, Rapleaf. Stack Overflow and Twitter, as well as thousands of organisations’ public websites. In the future we will offer integration with many more data sources, both public (e.g. social networking sites) and private (e.g. your address book and your CRM system).

We make a clear distinction between:

Public data: which is information that users have chosen to make public on the internet, and which anyone could find on one of the major search engines. We aggregate public data, take into account corrections and feedback, and show this information to everyone who uses Rapportive.

Private data: which is privileged information to which only you have access. In order to provide the Rapportive service, we may need to process this data behind the scenes; however, private data will never be shown or disclosed to any other Rapportive user or any third party (unless you explicitly ask us to share it).

• I am very concerned about privacy and don’t want to give access to my Gmail account to any application.

Good for you. You should be extremely thoughtful about protecting access to your accounts and selective about applications you choose to use. You’ll be happy to hear that it is not necessary to share your Gmail password to use Rapportive. If you have any concerns, I suggest you take a peek at Rapportive’s privacy policy for further details.

• How, then, do I add it?

Rapportive is clever in that it is added to your browser, not to your Gmail account. If you use Chrome, Firefox or Safari, you can easily add Rapportive by visiting their site.

Your turn. Have you used Rapportive already? What are your favorite tools which help you make your email even more of a workhorse?

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Related articles which may interest you:

• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• Facebook Tip: How To Choose Who Can See Your Friends
• Ready for Yet Another Social Platform? Here Comes Google Buzz
• What is Your Favorite “Real-time” Tool?
• Help Me Help You – When You Have Questions

Does it ever feel that there is a non-stop downpour of Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, LinkedIn connections and blog posts? Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in content?

If so and you spend any amount of time online, it isn’t just your imagination. The larger our networks of contacts, the more information we see pushed in our direction every time one of our friends shares a link to a news article, their latest blog post and a funny video of a cat dressed as Lady Gaga.

How frequently is new content added online, you may ask? It can take an awful lot of leg work and number crunching to figure that out. Luckily, Gary Hayes from Personalizemedia has put together a nifty tool which easily allows us to get a snapshot overview of the flow of uploaded content. Take a closer look and you’ll see that you can customize the data you see by selecting a timeframe and type of information (social media, mobile or games).

If you’re interested in digging deeper into the source data used here, you can find all the relevant links on Gary’s blog.

I’ll keep this blog post short because I just found out that I’ve got several hundred thousand YouTube videos to catch up on and that’s going to take some serious time.

Image courtesy of Tiago Ribeiro.

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Related articles which may interest you:

• What is Your Favorite “Real-time” Tool?
• New Tool Makes My Email Work Harder and Smarter
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• I Don’t Care Where. You. Are. Right. Now.
• How-to: View and Organize Fan Pages on Facebook

You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore

Where did the romance go? When did we stop asking, “Tell me about yourself,” “Do you like to take long walks on the beach?” or even the tired old line, “What’s your sign?” Suddenly, upon meeting someone new, they immediately try to score and ask me to go over to their place to seal the deal.

Am I talking about my dating life? Hardly. I’m talking about my relationships with people where I spend much more of my time – online.

Talk (And Listen) To Me

• “Hi. My name is Irene. It is nice to meet you.”
• “Well (pretend you heard your name here), I’ll bet it is nice to meet me. You’re lucky you met me just in time because, boy do I have the answers to all of the problems you have or may have one day in the future. I know you’ll love my product/service/website so much that you’ll want to run out and spontaneously tell everyone you know about it, so here are some extra cards to pass out to all of your friends. Hey, you’re awesome, hope to talk with you again soon. Bye now.”
• “Uh, what did you say your name was?”

Have you had this experience? When this happens online, it takes the form of email, newsletters, Facebook mail or direct messages on Twitter. As soon as you’ve “friended” someone on Facebook or followed someone on Twitter, you immediately receive newsletters or messages telling you to “click here” to do something – which benefits the other person. I’ve seen this on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

(click to enlarge images)

You Lost Me At “Click Here”

I connected with you because I wanted to get to know you. Consider it a first date, or the possibility of a first date. I don’t want you to kiss me, tell me what I need or invite me over to your place. If you do, you’re out. On Twitter, this is one of many reasons I will immediately unfollow you. On Facebook, I’ll unfriend you. On LinkedIn, I’ll disconnect. Through our connection, you have additional access to contact me directly. This access is a privilege, not an opportunity take our relationship where I’m not ready to go. No, I don’t want to come over to see your etchings or listen to your stereo (yes, someone really did ask me to do this when I was in college). I most certainly do not want to click on your link to buy something or find out more about you. It’s rude and presumptuous. It’s spam and, most importantly, it’s all about you.

When you want to talk, let me know. I’ll be here. In the meantime, stop groping my email address and trying to get to 3rd base. It ain’t gonna happen.

Related articles which may interest you:

• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• Happy Holidays! Please Enjoy This Spam
• Facebook Tip: How To Choose Who Can See Your Friends
• New Tool Makes My Email Work Harder and Smarter
• I Don’t Care Where. You. Are. Right. Now.

While many of us use social networking tools differently, most of us struggle with similar questions and challenges.

• Should I connect only with family and good friends on Facebook and only business contacts on LinkedIn?
• How secure should I feel when using Facebook’s privacy settings to determine which groups of friends can or cannot see particular photos?
• Should I be concerned when someone tags me in a photo or I comment on someone else’s post?
• How can I organize the people I’m connected to so I see updates and news from the people I care about the most?

Social Networking Lines Get Blurred

With the unprecedented growth of Facebook, it has become  the largest social networking platform by far. Even when we start out with one strategy, we can have a hard time sticking to the plan. We may have planned originally to connect only to family and friends, but then our co-workers found us there and we couldn’t really ignore their Friend Request, now could we? And then, there are the other parents in the carpool. And, a few of their kids wanted to become Facebook Friends, too. All of a sudden, our neatly organized idea of how we wanted to compartmentalize our activities online has gone to hell in a hand-basket.

When did things become so complicated? Is this because social networking is new? No, gathering with our friends, sharing news and planning events is not new. I’m sure this has been going on since the early days of humans interacting and forming communities. Doing all of this online is the part that is new and this is where things get really interesting – and a little messy.

The Real Life Social Network

I’m excited to share a thought-provoking presentation about Real Life Social Networks from Paul Adams, a blogger and researcher at Google. The presentation highlights research done to understand how real-life networks work and how current social networking platforms, like Facebook, work with or against these existing relationships.

With the internet abuzz about the rumors, and fairly high likelihood, that Google is hard at work at its own social network, possibly called Google Me, this makes Paul’s take on networking all the more intriguing. Could this be a glimpse into what’s next from Google?

I encourage you to walk through his presentation below. Don’t be intimidated by the large number of slides (216). Many of them are just images and he includes explanations where context is needed. Even if you don’t make it through the entire presentation, you will come to see how moving our offline, or “real world,” networks to an online environment (and then, throwing in a bunch of people we don’t know as well) starts to get complicated. Lots of food for thought here.

Which of his points ring true with you with regard to your own use of social networking? Anything else you’d add?

Related articles which may interest you:

• New Tool Makes My Email Work Harder and Smarter
• Ready for Yet Another Social Platform? Here Comes Google Buzz
• Dear Ex-Facebook Friend…
• Facebook Tip: How To Choose Who Can See Your Friends
• Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You

You know those words; the ones that make your skin crawl and set your teeth to grind mode when you see them? What’s up with those people anyway? Don’t they know how to spell? Did they nap all through elementary school?

I’m sure that people have always misspelled words since the dawn of written language. I imagine there were times when someone was meticulously documenting important information inside a cave and suddenly slapped themselves on the forehead once they realized they had drawn a bird instead of a horse. Where was spell-check when they needed it?

Now, we do have spell-check and it is embedded is most of the applications we use everyday – email, smartphones and social networking sites. Still, it seems that many of us take all those spelling and grammar rules as a gentle suggestion (kind of like when your mom says you should wear a jacket, but you know full well that only the nerdy kids listen to their moms and choose to ignore her).

We remember how to spell correctly, we just don’t always do it. My scientific/off-the-top-of-my-head analysis points to a number of possibilities: We don’t know we’re making a mistake and can’t be held responsible; we know we’re making a mistake and don’t care; we know we’re making a mistake, but think it’s cute/cool; we just copied someone else, so it’s their fault.

Possible contributing factors and  personal observations:

We’re busy: Who has the time to re-read that email or tweet before sending it? Sure, there’s that red line underneath the word screaming out to alert us to the fact that the computer’s dictionary doesn’t recognize the word, but we’re not going to let the dictionary tell us what to write now, are we?

Fat thumbs: Give us the most user-friendly way to type on a phone and, still, we make mistakes. Doesn’t that footer Sent from my iphone excuse all virtual grammatical sins?

Contractions are really hard: When you want to shorten “you are,” the result is not “your.” Even when you spell it that way often, it’s still wrong. Stop it.

Words that sound alike are really hard: “Where are they?” “Their (or there) at the store.” <cue: nails on a chalkboard>

Character counts: When we’re using Twitter or SMS text messages, we are limited to a certain number of characters and this tends to lead to a lot of creativity. I get this, but I don’t get why I see these same abbreviations in emails or other communications.

Say what: I’ve heard people of all ages use text-speak in conversation. Trust me, it’s a special experience to hear LOL or WTF during a conversation. If we’re talking, I won’t charge you for the extra words, I promise. If you want to laugh, go ahead and laugh; restraining yourself to LOL really isn’t necessary.

I’m old: Is this just another one of my many “Get off my lawn” moments and I’m making much ado about nothing? Is this something that only those of us of a certain age allow to get under our skin?

Which words, abbreviations and acronyms do you see used online which really get your skin crawling? C ya l8r, thxbye.

Image courtesy of trpnblies7

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Related articles which may interest you:

• I Don’t Care Where. You. Are. Right. Now.
• Social Media Stats – It’s Raining Content!
• Just Because We’re Social Networking “Friends” Doesn’t Mean I’ll Go To 3rd Base With You
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• How-to: View and Organize Fan Pages on Facebook

As a parent, there have been many moments in my life when I considered locking my child in a closet. It would have been for her own safety, mind you. And, I would have let her out when she was, say, 30 or so. I realized that I might have had some legal entanglements to deal with along the way, but there were still those moments when I wondered “what if…”

It’s Scary Out There

Before you call the authorities to report me, there are two important things you should know:

1. No, I never really did this – not even for a second. But, it is a scary world out there. I also never used one of those leash-things with my daughter, but I did come to understand why some parents choose to do so.
2. My child is no longer a minor and perfectly able to manage her own life now. She somehow managed to make it through her formative years relatively unscathed, despite my occasional urges to save her from the outside world.

We all want to protect our children for as long as possible, yet we also want them to learn how to navigate the world on their own, making smart decisions along the way. How do we find that balance of holding on and letting go? It is already an enormous challenge in the real world. For many parents, the prospect of helping their children stay safe in the virtual world is even more overwhelming.

Enter SocialShield

If you are looking for a way to monitor your kid’s online browsing activity or chat/IM conversations, there are many easy tools which will allow you to do so. There are numerous keystroke-logging programs which record each word your child types on the keyboard, meaning you get to see everything – emails, passwords, the whole enchilada. These tools may let you know what your child is doing online, but tell you nothing about the identity of their friends or their friends’ activity. It is often this more meaty information that parents seek in order to prevent their children from falling prey to a bully or sexual predator.

Stating that their tools “give parents a 360° view of their kids’ social networking activities,” SocialShield has recently received quite a bit of media attention. After reading yesterday’s post on ReadWriteWeb about the new service, I decided to sign-up for the trial period and take it for a test drive.

Setting Up My SocialShield Account

SocialShield provides a free 14-day trial period. Like most services, this requires credit card information up front. Once the information was entered, I moved on to “Add a Child.” I wondered how they would be able to access my child’s information without knowing her password and how they would verify that it was indeed my own child I was adding. I was curious to see what would prevent me from monitoring a friend (or a stranger) by adding them to my account.

(click on image to enlarge)

To add my daughter, I added all of her email addresses and selected “I attest that this is my daughter” from the drop-down list of choices. On the list are son/daughter, nephew/niece, grandson/granddaughter, other male/female. To test whether SocialShield magically knew if the person I was adding was really my child (of course, it can’t know this), I decided to add another person. Not wanting to spy on a friend or a stranger, I chose the one person in that comfortable middle-ground. I selected “other – female” and added my mother, feeling fairly sure I wouldn’t uncover anything scandalous.

Once you’ve added a child, there it is front and center: you need your kid’s passwords. If you were looking for the secret door into your kid’s accounts without having access to their login credentials, this isn’t it (hint: it doesn’t exist). And, simply being Facebook friends with them isn’t enough to get you the information needed for SocialShield to do its thing and alert you to potentially problematic friends and activity. At this point in the process, you can either connect SocialShield to their accounts yourself if you know their usernames and passwords or you can generate an email which is sent to the child asking them to allow access.

(click on image to enlarge)

This will then lead the child to add their accounts to SocialShield by using Facebook Connect, for example. I discussed this with my daughter ahead of time and she authorized access to her account herself.

(click on image to enlarge)

My SocialShield Report

• I received a number of alerts for my daughter’s Facebook account. SocialShield highlighted her Facebook friends who were “significantly older” and those who have “adultlike accounts.”
• To take another look at how alerts were triggered, I also added myself to my SocialShield account. As I did with my mother, I selected “Other – female.” I received 12 pages of alerts for my own friends, most of which were triggered by “adultlike accounts.”
• SocialShield was able to find and display 150+ photos of me from Facebook, yet was not able to find any of my daughter’s 700+ Facebook photos.
• SocialShield alerted me to an update posted by one of my daughter’s friends on her Facebook wall because it included the word head. Of course, each parent needs to evaluate the context on their own. In this instance, her friend was referencing a song which “got stuck in” his head.
• While I did not request that my mother authorize access to her accounts, SocialShield did tell me that she has (wait for it…) a MySpace account. Really? My mother, whose 75th birthday is this weekend, is on MySpace? After the laughter subsided, I went to MySpace to search for her. Searching for her name delivered no results. Searching for her email address delivered one result – a 24 year old male with Tom as his only MySpace friend. Something seems wonky here. It seems someone may have used her email address to set up an account and that SocialShield did a simple search for her email address without any way to verify her identity.

The Important Stuff: My Overall Impressions

Straight to the point, my high-level thoughts:

• SocialShield and other monitoring tools are gaining traction because there is real risk out there in the online world. The concept is a solid one. Many parents want a quick and, for the less savvy parents, easy way to keep on eye on their kids’ activity.
• There is no way to automate parenting. We cannot assign responsibility to software or an online service to do the hard work for us. Nothing replaces having an ongoing dialogue with our children about the world and how to make the right choices. (More on this to come in an upcoming post.)
• While the concept may be solid, SocialShield’s execution needs quite a bit of work  (examples below).

Specific concerns (in no particular order):

• One of the key points in the ReadWriteWeb article was the endorsement of the PTA. While I was able to find this information repeated on many other websites, I could not find anything about it on either the PTA or the SocialShield websites. If the endorsement is real, I would expect to be able to verify it easily.
• The FAQ section should be much more robust. For example, when my results indicated “adultlike accounts” for a huge number of my own and my daughter’s friends, I naturally wanted to understand the meaning of this term. Nowhere on the site is this explained. Does this mean that these people have LinkedIn profiles (which usually means the person is an adult) or that they post porn to their Facebook accounts? I tweeted the question to SocialShield and received this reply: “An account like costco really should be only for adults, not kids. we may find someone who says he’s a kid has this=red flag. A red flag like that says there’s something wrong and you need to look deeper at that person or account. we look at more than fifty sites like this to see if we can find suspicious items.” I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Costco that triggered hundreds of my friends to be labeled as an “adultlike account,” but I get the idea. Either way, the triggers and definitions need to be explained in order to be useful to parents.
• I think most adults don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes when granting access through Facebook Connect. It is entirely unreasonable to generate the email shown earlier, send it to a (presumably) young child, expect them to read/understand it and then walk through the Facebook Connect process. There is no way for the parent to know ahead of time what will be sent to the child.
• Take the results with a big grain of salt. Given that SocialShield told me it could find no photos of my daughter on Facebook (despite the fact that there are over 700) and that it returned a false positive MySpace result for my mother leads me to question the accuracy of the report.

These are my initial impressions after using SocialShield for two days. In this time span, the report has shown no new activity even though both my daughter and I (and our friends) have been active online. Obviously, the tool is not intended for short-term use, so you may choose to try it on your own. I look forward to hearing your feedback and experience with this and other similar tools.

Related articles which may interest you:

• How Not to Use Twitter for Business (FroYo Edition)
• New Tool Makes My Email Work Harder and Smarter
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• I Don’t Care Where. You. Are. Right. Now.
• Happy Holidays! Please Enjoy This Spam

Just a quick post for today as I’m out of the country with limited internet access, but I wanted to share this email I received from Facebook today.

As you probably know, Facebook has been facing a barrage of complaints regarding their “public is the new norm” approach to privacy which resulted in much of your/our content being made public by default. This criticism has come from journalists, users, senators – pretty much everyone. I’m hopeful these changes will make it simpler for all users to understand how to control you can see and have access to their information.

Still, please always remember the often-repeated advice:  If you aren’t prepared for everyone to see your content (information, photo, etc.), you probably shouldn’t post it online anywhere – period.

Please share your thoughts, questions and observations in the comments below.

My email from Facebook:

Hi Irene,

Facebook will roll out changes today that will make it easier for our users to understand and control their privacy settings. As this change will have an impact on our users, we wanted to let you, a valued advertising partner, know about it.

 Please note that this change will not affect your advertising campaigns and there is no action required on your part.Facebook is a company that moves quickly, constantly innovating and launching new products to improve the user experience.

The feedback we heard from users was that in our efforts to innovate, some of our privacy settings h ad become confusing. We believe in listening to our users and taking their feedback into account whenever possible. We think the following changes address these concerns by providing users with more control over their privacy settings and making them more simple to use.

Starting today, Facebook will: *Provide an easy-to-use “master” control that enables users to set who can see the content they share through Facebook. This enables users to choose, with just one click, the overall privacy level they’re comfortable with for the content they share on Facebook. Of course, users can still use all of the granular controls we’ve always offered, if they wish.

*Significantly reduce the amount of information that must be visible to everyone on Facebook. Facebook will no longer require that users’ friends and connections are visible to everyone. Only Name, Profile Picture, Networks and Gender must be publicly available. Users can opt to make all other connections private.

*Make it simple to control whether other applications and websites access any user information. While a majority of our users love Facebook apps and Facebook-enhanced websites, some may prefer not to share their information outside of Facebook. Users can now opt out with just one click.I encourage you to take a moment to read our CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post and check out the new Facebook Privacy Page.

Thanks,The Facebook Ads Team

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From the AlmostSavvy mailbag:

David asks, “How do I stop receiving an email each time someone connects with me on LinkedIn?”

Great question, David!

LinkedIn can be a real workhorse when it comes to our networking efforts. The potential benefits are huge, but filtering content can become a challenge. The good news is, like most networking sites, we have the ability to customize how we’d like to receive information from our connections.

I’ve recorded a short video demonstrating how to change how you receive these notifications from LinkedIn. Let me know in the comments if this was helpful to you and if you’ve got other questions.

Related articles which may interest you:

• Facebook Tip: How To Choose Who Can See Your Friends
• New Tool Makes My Email Work Harder and Smarter
• Social Networking Friends vs. Real Life Friends
• How-to: View and Organize Fan Pages on Facebook
• Social Media Stats – It’s Raining Content!