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.

Since the release of Google Buzz, I have been thinking quite a bit about usage cases of public and private ( even without the mobile usage case as this goes even to a different level).  In our daily lives we touch many different products that serve this kind of public/private usage case and have been an established behavior associated with them.  Our emails have a certain privacy shroud wrapped around them even though we may have conversations with people on many different levels….

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.