This is something that came up from my long discussion yesterday evening with Pravish, who’s joining us as the Techie Captain at Digital Canvas.

The Startup that will grow

What's happening with the FB privacy settings? Click to see larger cartoon

This cartoon has been made after reading this, this and this. It has been made just for fun. But, I do have a few things on the serious side to add to it too

I totally stand with Sanjay’s viewpoint & perspective about the whole thing. He’s very practically drawn the analogies and there’s nothing more that can be added to it.

There’s a concern Mahesh has raised about large set of friends. Let me put it in a situation, totally within his perspective:

Mahesh has 4151 friends, as of now. He’ll definitely have his employees, his friends, his family, his relatives and so many more of his real & virtual contacts, all in his Facebook friends list, creating complex overlapping groups/networks of people.

Assuming, if he goes down to a booze party with 10 old friends. And wants to post photos/videos from that booze party and wants to share it with all these 10 people, 20 of his current close friends, and a couple of people here and there and doesn’t want to share it with anyone else.

I see it as a valid concern! The problem lies in the fact that a lot of users do not know that such a feature already exists on Facebook!!

Lets see it in images how, this can be achieved. I will demonstrate this by going into one of my photo albums on Facebook.

Since I want only a selected set of friends to see it, I go to Edit Info & select Customize... in the Privacy setting.

I first add my friend Pranshu to it.

Followed by this, I add a FB list I'm maintaining, viz. Community - Kolkata

I want all my Web Designer friends to see it. So I add my Web Designers FB list as well!

I want another of my friend, Ankita to be able to see it. So I add her as well. Followed by this, I just save these settings & voila!!

Whoa!! Whoa!! So I can add my Facebook lists here!! That makes it so cool & controllable!

Wait. There’s a problem. This is a problem which a lot of us have been facing & will face.

Facebook lists is  the amazing feature in concern here, which was introduced in the end of 2007.

A lot of people joined Facebook much earlier and already had a lot of friends on their list, some of them with the number of added friends large enough! Different people started using lists at different points in time. The result of this, is that come what may, even if we put in enough efforts to create lists out of our contacts, I’m sure there will be extremely few of you readers, who will have a `totally` updated and maintained set of Facebook lists!!

So, what it essentially boils down to is that we have the superpower of maintaining our privacy and share with full granularity, but we’ll have to sit down and categorize our contacts into lists. Trust me, though my categorized contacts are not completely managed, but to the certain extent that they are, it helps me a lot in certain situations, like inviting people to an event, or suggesting Fan Pages, etc. There can be various uses of maintaining these lists, just like the one demonstrated above!

So, from now on, whenever you add a friend, make sure you mark him on the relevant lists, right away!!

Other aspects of this topic are also open for discussion here! So, drop in your comments.