As I was on Facebook quite early, I was able to bring a lot of my friends into my space. When I first joined I valued Facebook as a very private area to share information.  However overtime, I opened up to accepting less intimate friends, more business colleagues and light-relationships as well.   This definitely changed my style of  posts to more non-private discussions.

Here is a chart that shows how the privacy setting were from 2005 to April 2010.  For the information that you add to any of these areas,  it may be shared if you are not careful.  In many ways, they have also changed the privacy settings with new releases, that might have not caught your attention to the new access availability.

My 10 rules of thumb for using Facebook

1. when you post something, take the perspective that the entire world could see it anyway, anytime in the future.  i.e like when you recommend a restaurant to a stranger  ( the Definition of a Friend on Facebook may be different then a real life Friend)
2. Thinks that may help you or your business are good to post on Facebook. Leverage the viral nature as a business tool between you and your friends.
3. If somebody pastes something personal about you, you do not like, delete it and then send a private message to explain way!
4. If you do create controversial discussions, please note that these will always be there and may haunt you some day.
5. Becareful with your birthday, and contact information as they are the only two things that they keep between you and your friends
6. As Facebook adds location information, be especially careful.
7. All of your pictures will potentially become public and owned by Facebook, so becareful
8. Your “likes” will be shared, it is now part of the social web as Facebook calls it, so only “like” something if you want it shared
9. Facebook is becoming a very powerful search engine, so use it that way and to get advice on things that you are looking for
10. Throw in about 10~20% of your posts some kind of humor…..so then it makes it unclear if you really meant that or not?

These charts are from Matt Mckeon.  I have not done the research to check if these are accurate, so I am quoting him and you can go directly to his site.  I just thought this was a very interesting thing to share….. and “liked” the visual very much.

This was my experience with the connectivity with CNN.

1)  First of all, when I was as the CNN site,  I noticed the Facebook Share Widget.

2) So then I clicked “Facebook Connect” and went through the series of processes to Connect

….. Facebook Connect in Action….

3) I then had the option to sign-up for the CNN network…. which I did and become fully connected between Facebook and CNN.

4)  So lets take this for a ride….. I noticed I could go to the page within CNN to see all the articles recommended by Friends

5)  ….Then I found an interesting article on “Smell Sensors”.   I  ”commented” like and left a comment.

6) That comment was automatically posted to my Wall ( News Stream)

Facebook has been successful in not only owning the user, but they do a great job in “viral marketing”.  Will this growth continue or will privacy kill them? Will they become the next Internet? Will they form that unique strategic partnership with Apple?  They are consistently going from country to country and becoming the underlining social graph.

However, there are countries that have not become dominated yet by Facebook.  Not only are they in the top of Apple’s portfolio of must downloaded applications, Mobile has been know to be a usage case of social media ( >50%).  Many strong mobile players such as Mocospace, AirG, Brightkite, Loopt, Gowalla, Foursquare keep on growing, but the shear volume of growth of Facebook is astounding.

Many companies have leveraged “Facebook Connect” as a way to build there usage base, and they seem unstoppable.  Bebo is up for sale, and the other social networks are taking on a completely new business models.   Even Twitter has not shown the growth yet as Facebook, and as Facebook has prided itself with Direct to the end-user, they can bring any kind of app as integrated into their platform and just crush the competition.  Location was launched recently in Facebook, but when are we going to see extravagant maps tied to the overall service.

As they say, “what goes up- must come down” so it will be interesting to see where they peak or will they just become the WWW…. or FFF.

What I find interesting and challenging for Google as they attempt to enter the social media space is about spread of the social graph amongst users that are looking for choice.  Even though Google has 176M users of Gmail, Facebook is ~400M  strong as a user base, with many of them using Gmail as a subset to their Facebook accounts.   I thought with the release of Wave, Google was positioning itself out of the box from its own services to have an agnostic service that could eventually spread to all users.  What makes Facebook so powerful ( in my mind) is that it can exist with many other products as a connector.  Once you build something into an existing product, I find it pigeon-holes you into the users of that service and in many ways you can fall victim to your own boundaries.  This has been a very complicated position for many years when I was at Nokia.   Even when many services were launched, they were mainly only for Nokia devices and it was a challenge for those services to also work across other devices to create that brand awareness that this existed.  This is my opinion, but I feel Social communication services should be agnostic to all services and devices and work as a form of connector of services.  How will Buzz work within a Google defined structure of Gmail vs. Facebook that is agnostic and a service that stands alone on its own right that now is getting positioned across all mobile operators and something complementary to your email, IM, etc…   In other words, I would say it would probably make more strategic sense for Facebook to incorporate the email service of your choice as opposed to try to create your own email service that again artificially creates a boundary of usage when users are comfortable with their own email service and email address to begin with.

I do believe that Google will find a very strong way to make Buzz a success, but being positioned in Gmail was something that might be limiting.  Any other thoughts out there?  Here is also a great presentation by Facebook Mobile at #MWC this past week.

Here is my first pass thoughts on why Buzz has opened the debate around Privacy.   It is not that Buzz is any different from the status box on Facebook and twitter, or even the one that Linked-in has added.  I think the real debate is about around the social behavior around privacy and the tools we use to manage our conversations.  Twitter exists on its own with the tools surrounding it as a certain usage case for many-to-many public discussions.  I would not think that I would want to include these types of communications in the inbox of my email, but Twitter has in fact done so with SMS and Text messaging that has been private.

I am still trying to figure out in my mind the ethos of social behavior and the tools we use, but email and twitter seem to be on completely opposite sides of my social communication graph.

I spent the summer of 2007 working on this business model of influencers in the social graph of communities, and the real value of “WOM” in a digital form is finally taking root via social networks.  The challenges still remain around how to associate a brand in the user-generated content of conversations, but with the right platform and analytics, getting the community to back a brand and support it can be quite powerful.   This is an exciting time for social media platforms and I am looking forward to the next couple months of annoucements and the real indications of media budgets moving to social media platforms.

Last year on Dec 12, at 3:27  they announced the 100M users on Facebook.  It is incredible that in less then 1 year ( if they do hit the mark and announce it) they could repeat this with Mobile.  This is an exciting time as it is the first service that has broke through the 100M user mark in Mobile outside of China.

Last week Facebook announced its 300M unique user!  Incredible.  I also heard that there is now over 65M users that are accessing Facebook daily from mobile devices.   I remember the days at Nokia where we discussed a service that had a mobile audience of >100M, but today I believe with over 65M active users a day on mobile, this has got to be getting pretty close to the the top.  I am sure there is a service in China that is getting more then 65M active users a day, but for something so sticky and mobile, I think we will probably see Facebook to be the first to “break the 100M mark on mobile”

So where does this leave them with a business model?  Also there was some unique discussions of Facebook killing on advertising.

Last week when I was at Advertising Week, Facebook sponsored a wrap-up party that I had the honor to attend ( Thanks Matt/Lance) .

So it is clear to me that Search and Social are keys to a digital marketing strategy in harmony and it only validates the dramatic ad revenue growth of Facebook.  Interested to see what Twitter does with links and lead-gen.  Will Social media someday match Search Revenues?  As long as the Brands can be satisfied with the proper placement of brands in the mix, as Search has become a direct marketing tool, Social media can become a brand marketing tool….. See the book by Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen ( Communities Dominate Brands- written many years ago and quite visionary…)