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.

With the recent rumours of Facebook launching a mobile advertising platform this year for the 100M mobile uniques and a recent article by Robert Scoble about “Supertweets” as a business model for Twitter in the advertising world, we are finally about to see a real explosion in social media advertising.  In addition with the announcement today of  Ex-Googler Tom Phillips to join Media6Degrees as CEO indicates the massive shift of talent into the space of social media  that is about to begin.

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.