http://mashable.com/2009/02/20/delicious-new-tools/
February 20, 2009 - 10:35 am PDT - by Sean P. Aune Add a Comment
delicious-logoDelicious, a powerful social bookmarking tool, has been around for what seems like forever, and while it may not get as much press as Digg, it still has an extremely active and loyal group of users. There are a number of tools out there that cater to these users, some of which still even stick by the old del.icio.us moniker.
Here are over 80 tools for everything from your mobile device to your blog, and more, that can help you view your bookmarks in new and unique ways, backup your bookmarks in a secure location, take your bookmarks with you on the go, blog about your most recent saves, and then some.
Have a favorite Delicious tool or resource that we missed? Tell us more about it in the comments.
Blog Widgets & Tools
This collection of blog tools and widgets will give you greater control over placing Delicious tools in blog sidebars. Especially nice is the del.icio.us custom size tag cloud which is perfect for Ning accounts.
deliciouspreview2
del.icio.us custom size - A widget for the Delicious tag cloud that allows you to play around with the dimensions more than the official one does.
del.icio.us linkrolls - A highly customizable third party widget for displaying your latest bookmarks on your blog.
Del.icio.us Search - Customizable third party widget that will let you save a search on a tag or a user, set the number of results to show, set the font family and more.
del.icio.us Spy - An auto-refreshing widget that shows the latest websites added to Delicious on your site.
Delicious Preview - A tabbed third party widget that will let you see the hotlist, popular, recent and the tag cloud.
Popular Bookmarks on Delicious - See the most popular recent bookmarks on Delicious in this third party widget for your site.
Share on Del.icio.us - A simple widget you can include in your blog template to aid readers in saving your posts to Delicious.
Delicious Official Tools
Delicious has several official tools for casual use as well as posting information on your blogs and sites. They continue to explore what their API is capable of with tools such as Blog Posting, which they are still testing.
tagrolls
Blog Posting - An experimental tool from Delicious that will allow you to set up a daily posting of your most recent bookmarks to your blog.
“Bookmark this on Delicious” buttons - Official buttons to help you promote your posts to your readers to save them on Delicious.
Bookmarklet buttons for any browser - Allows you to add easy bookmarklets to Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.
Delicious Add-On - An official add-on that places buttons in your Firefox navigation bar to ease your adding a site to your Delicious account. Will also help you to open a sidebar to view your bookmarks and search by tags.
Delicious Application for Facebook - Share all of your activity from Delicious with your Facebook friends with the official application.
Internet Explorer Buttons - Adds easy Delicious tools to your Internet Explorer toolbar so you can add items to your account more rapidly.
Linkrolls - An official widget from Delicious that will show your latest bookmarks on your blog or site.
Network Badges - Display information about your Delicious account such as the number of bookmarks, number of fans and so on with this official release from Delicious.
Play Tagger - Allows you to play bookmarked MP3s from Delicious on your site.
Tagometer Badge - Powered directly by Delicious, this badge will show off your tags and how many saves you’ve made to each.
Tagrolls - The official tag cloud from Delicious that you can post on your site or blog to show off your various tags and allow people to explore them.
Firefox Extensions
Any popular service is sure to have at least a few extensions for the Firefox browser, and Delicious is no different. Add-ons such as the del.icio.us Sidebar are extremely useful to let you see your bookmarks any time you like as you’re browsing.
bookmarker
Bookmarker - A universal sidebar for social bookmarking networks such as Delicious, mister-wong, Digg and several more.
Delinkydink - Allows you to send and receive “links for you” notices to your account.
del.icio.us IncSearch - An improved and speedier search for your bookmarks that is incremental and also allows for the use of multiple keywords.
del.icio.us One-Click Delete - As the name says, this is a one-click solution for deleting bookmarks from your Delicious account.
del.icio.us Sidebar - Allows you to delete, edit and search your bookmarks from the sidebar in a simpler manner than the official add-on does.
deliGoo - Delicious (del.icio.us) Search Engine - Gives you an extra choice in your Tools to search not your tags for Delicious bookmarks, but the actual contents of the pages you have bookmarked. Handy if you are looking for a certain passage.
Delicious Keywords-Tag-Suggest - This add-on will suggest more tags for you to include when adding a bookmark based on words and terms in the page you are bookmarking.
Groowe Search Toolbar - A versatile toolbar which packs the functionality of numerous services into one installation. Features controls for sites such as Delicious, Ask.com, Google, Digg and more.
Post to del.icio.us - Uses a button to open up a simple form to easily add bookmarks and tags to your account.
SimpleDelicious - An extension which attempts to make managing your Delicious bookmarks simple by focusing on doing nothing but that one task.
Greasemonkey Scripts
Greasemonkey always seems to have tools for services that make you wonder why the services themselves don’t just include the features to begin with. Scripts like dejalicious seem like such a simple idea, and perfect for the person with hundreds, if not thousands, of bookmarks.
delicious-tagthe-net
Auto-Fill Delicious.com v5’s Tag Field - Will automatically fill in the “Save a Bookmark on Delicious” page with the tags from the URL.
AutoDelicious - Adds an auto-complete feature for tags on the Delicious posting page.
dejalicious - This script will check the page you are currently viewing against your Delicious account to see if you’ve already bookmarked it.
Del.icio.us: Bundle sorter - Will put any unbundled tags at the beginning of the list so you can easily find them and rectify the situation.
Delicious.com - Auto-Highlight Bundled Tags - Will automatically check the “Highlight tags already in another bundle” any time you load the bundle editing page.
Delicious.com - Sort Visible Links - Allows you to sort your visible bookmarks by title, url, popularity or the default method.
Delicious for Google Reader - Adds an “Add to delicious” button inside of Google Reader.
Delicious.com Thumbs - Allows you to add thumbnail images of web sites to your bookmarks for easier site recognition as you browse through them.
delicious star rater - Gives you the ability to assign star ratings to your bookmarks so that you can easily spot the ones that are most important to you.
fav.icio.us2 - Allows you to add favicons to your bookmarks for easier recognition.
google meet delicious - Searches your bookmarks at the same time you search Google.
Remember Delicious Login Info - Remembers your login info so you can login to the site faster.
tagthe.net-del.icio.us - This script extracts suggested keywords for you to use as tags when you go to bookmark a page.
iPhone and iPod Touch Applications
While it’s a bit surprising that Delicious hasn’t released an official iPhone application yet, there are a few out there that are filling the gap until that inevitable day. Apps like Tasty give you just about every feature a die hard Delicious user could want on a mobile phone.
red delicious
Bookmarks - Allows you to access your Delicious account from the iPhone so that you can use your bookmarks. It also allows you to add new ones from within Safari.
Red Delicious - Give your iPhone the ability to see your most recent bookmarks, explore by tag, search by keyword, see the most popular sites being bookmarked and more.
Tags - Allows you to browse your tags in an animated tag cloud, sync your bookmarks with Delicious, explore new ones and several more nifty features.
Tasty - Gives you a more visual representation of your Delicious bookmarks on the iPhone by letting you see favicons and screenshots of your bookmarks. Also allows you to browse, add, edit and more.
Mobile Applications
It seems like it took forever for Delicious to release m.delicious.com. Here are three great options for accessing Delicious from your mobile phone - perfect for those without iPhones.
delicious mona
Delicious Mona - A mobile application that allows you to read your news, save the site to Delicious, and then have access to it once you get to your computer so you can read it full screen.
m.delicious.com - A condensed version of Delicious from the site itself.
Mobilicio.us - A simple mobile-friendly interface for accessing your Delicious bookmarks from any web-enabled phone.
Visualization Tools
There are some fascinating tools out there for seeing Delicious in totally new, visual, ways. Some of them, like Delicious Soup, may seem a bit silly at first, but they grow on you as you explore what they can actually do.
hublog
del.icio.us direc.tor - Allows you to view your bookmark tags in a hierarchy and then sort them by name, tags or time created.
del.icio.us network explorer - Enter a username and see their connections, click on one and see all of their connections, and so on. Gets quite interesting after you’ve done a few and see how many crossovers there are.
Delicious Soup - A Flash based interface that shows your tags as jiggling spheres of a pink plasma like substance, the more sites in the tag, the larger it is. Click on one and it is brought to the center while receiving information at the bottom of the interface about that particular tag.
expialidocio.us - See your history on Delicious as a histogram. Slide along the timeline to see how many bookmarks you’ve added, a tag cloud for the specified time, and more.
extisp.icio.us - Allows you to generate a tag cloud for any user on Delicious and then explore what they have added to each of those tags.
graph.icio.us - Enter any user’s name and see a graph of their tags for the last 10 bookmarks they’ve added and explore them.
HubLog - Enter a tag you wish to research and get a Java representation of it that you can explore and see how people use it and what other words they connect it with.
LiveMarks - Watch an auto updating stream of bookmarks as they are added to Delicious. LiveMarks will even tell you if they are new to the system.
mapping del.icio.us - Through the use of geotags, you can map out the locations of your bookmarks to show off truly how much it is the world wide web.
Revealicious - Enter your user information and you will see a panel showing you all of your tags. Once you hover over one it will tell you the percentage of the bookmarks you use it for, and once you click on the tag, you get even more graphical breakdowns of just how you use that tag.
Thumblicio.us - See posts from any tag on Delicious as clickable thumbnails. Hover over any of them to learn more.
WordPress Plugins
Why not make Delicious work with your WordPress powered blog? Tools like del.icio.us for WordPress are perfect for making your bookmarks that much more social by sharing them with your readers.
wplinktools
del.icio.us for WordPress - Display your latest bookmarks on your blog with the option of showing descriptions or tags. del.icio.us for WordPress also allows filtering by tags.
delicious-plus - Shows off your Delicious bookmarks and lets you set options such as displaying favicons, descriptions, tags and more.
Postalicious - Allows you to automatically post your delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit or Yahoo Pipes bookmarks to your blog in the manner your choice.
WordPress Del.icio.us Syncer - Allows you to post digests of your Delicious bookmarks to your site.
WP_LinkTools - A customizable plugin that will add your posts to Delicious as soon as you publish them. Will also work for pages so that your site is fully bookmarked.
Miscellaneous Tools
Feeling left out of the applications game because you’re a user of Epiphany? Well, the Delicious crowd has you covered with add-ons like Epilicious. Opera, Mac OSX, Windows and just about everything in-between has a Delicious application of some sort available.
dashlicious
Backup Del.icio.us with Excel - An Excel spreadsheet that lets you download all of your Delicious bookmarks and back them up for safekeeping.
Cocoalicious - An open source Mac OSX desktop application client for your Delicious account.
dashLicious - A dashboard widget for Mac OSX that will allow you to add bookmarks, descriptions and tags to your account.
Del.icio.us Opera Buttons - Three buttons for the Opera browser that will take you to your bookmarks, your inbox and allow you to post new links to Delicious.
Delicer - A Windows desktop application that will give you full control over your Delicious account, including searching tags, editing and more.
Delicious Link Checker - A perl script that will check your bookmarks to see which are still active, and alert you to those that are now defunct.
Delimages - Enter a tag or username to filter by and see all of the images that have been posted related to them.
Epilicious - Works with Epiphany, the GNOME web browser, to sync your bookmarks with Delicious.
Fresh Del.icio.us - A client-side tool that will check your links and let you know which ones are broken so that you can keep your bookmarks up-to-date.
Grafolicious - Enter any URL and trace its history on Delicious and how it has performed.
konqil.icio.us - A service menu for Konqueror, the KDE desktop web browser.
Mischievous - A tool for Internet Explorer that lets you drag and drop sites you wish to read later and store them in Delicious. Also allows you to manage your bookmarks.
mysqlicious - Doesn’t offer a way to display the data, but this app will allow you to mirror your Delicious bookmarks to a MySQL database. How to display them is left up to you.
Oishii! - Every five minutes, Oishii! checks the latest links on Delicious and shows you the results that have more than 30 saves so you can get a sense of what people are interested in.
Pukka - A Mac OSX app that will allow you to post bookmarks to multiple accounts on services like Delicious or Ma.gnolia. Allows you to enter URLs in various manners allowing for far faster posting of new links.
Slash/Links - This software package allows you to set up a mirror of your Delicious bookmarks so that you can customize the user interface to something more to your liking and put it on a site. All controls for the bookmarks are still controlled on Delicious itself, but after that you can mirror them anywhere you like.
Scripted Re-Mark - A simple Web application for the mass editing and retagging of your bookmarks
Friday, February 20, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 2nd, 2009 11:00 AM
-Security Camera Image-Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”
Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.
1. Use Your Friend Lists
-Friend Lists Icon-I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”
There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:
* You can add each friend to more than one friend group
* Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
* Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them
I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.
Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).
You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.
2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.
How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:
1. Visit your search privacy settings page
2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
3. Click “Save Changes”
By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.
-Facebook Search Visibility Screenshot-
3. Remove Yourself From Google
Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.
For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.
By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.
4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake
This is the classic Facebook problem. You let lose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.
At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.
Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.
5. Protect Your Albums
-Facebook Photos Profile Screenshot-Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.
There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.
6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds
Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.
I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.
There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.
Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.
Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.
7. Protect Against Published Application Stories
This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”
This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.
More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.
8. Make Your Contact Information Private
I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.
The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.
If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.
For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.
As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.
9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts
Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things.
Adjust Wall Posting Visibility
Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.
Control Who Can Post to Your Wall
In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.
From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.
10. Keep Your Friendships Private
While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.
Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.
Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.
-Custom Friend Visibility Settings Screenshot-
Conclusion
These are just ten ways that you can protect your privacy on Facebook. While there are a few other small things to keep in mind, these ten settings are most important. Keep in mind that while you may have turned off the visibility of many profile sections, there is no way to prevent all photos or videos from being visible if friends of yours make the images visible.
The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgements in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.
While you may not want to configure all of the privacy settings outlined, simply knowing how to do so is a great step in the right direction. By following the 10 settings listed above you are well on your way to an embarrassment free future on Facebook!
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 2nd, 2009 11:00 AM
-Security Camera Image-Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”
Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.
1. Use Your Friend Lists
-Friend Lists Icon-I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”
There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:
* You can add each friend to more than one friend group
* Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
* Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them
I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.
Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).
You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.
2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.
How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:
1. Visit your search privacy settings page
2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
3. Click “Save Changes”
By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.
-Facebook Search Visibility Screenshot-
3. Remove Yourself From Google
Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.
For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.
By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.
4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake
This is the classic Facebook problem. You let lose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.
At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.
Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.
5. Protect Your Albums
-Facebook Photos Profile Screenshot-Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.
There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.
6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds
Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.
I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.
There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.
Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.
Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.
7. Protect Against Published Application Stories
This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”
This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.
More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.
8. Make Your Contact Information Private
I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.
The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.
If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.
For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.
As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.
9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts
Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things.
Adjust Wall Posting Visibility
Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.
Control Who Can Post to Your Wall
In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.
From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.
10. Keep Your Friendships Private
While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.
Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.
Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.
-Custom Friend Visibility Settings Screenshot-
Conclusion
These are just ten ways that you can protect your privacy on Facebook. While there are a few other small things to keep in mind, these ten settings are most important. Keep in mind that while you may have turned off the visibility of many profile sections, there is no way to prevent all photos or videos from being visible if friends of yours make the images visible.
The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgements in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.
While you may not want to configure all of the privacy settings outlined, simply knowing how to do so is a great step in the right direction. By following the 10 settings listed above you are well on your way to an embarrassment free future on Facebook!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)