I’m beginning to regret a bit signing up for Facebook. Don’t get me wrong I love Facebook, but I need to find a better way to hide information from people I don’t know that well, or I wouldn’t even consider friends.
For instance, I got a Facebook invite this week from someone who I work with that I get on ok with professionally, but personally I can’t stand him. I felt forced into a corner as how could I reject his invitation, when he could see that I’d accepted all the other Facebook invitations?
I’m also a bit concerned that Facebook is making it harder for me to keep my work life separate from my personal life, which trust me, are very different! One of my colleagues also picked up on colleagues suddenly being able to see what she does in her spare time, when she wrote on another colleagues wall:
Remember, anything that goes on facebook, stays on facebook!
Facebook’s privacy settings don’t help either as I need more control than being able to turn access on or off to parts of my profile. What I almost need for instance is a Wall that anyone can post to, and a separate special Wall that only my ‘real’ friends can post to.
Even amongst my friends I almost need to be able to control what info they can see. For instance, the friends in my profile span all of my 33 years, so there are a lot of old girlfriends and random snogs mixed in there. At the moment only one of them has been brave (or silly?) enough to add this information to her profile. But, what would happen if they all decided to do the same? Would you be happy having your whole sex life documented for the whole world to see?
For instance I knew to the second when the lady who has gone public about our past relationship broke up with her boyfriend, whether she wanted me to or not, as her profile went from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’. TechDigest have an interesting post on this issue, which touches upon the other side of the coin by asking when do you change your profile to saying that you are in a ‘relationship’, and whether or not you should you get the other party’s approval first!
I think I need Dan and Jennifer’s help to deal with my Social Networking relationship issues!
