Facebook and LinkedIn

In the past couple of weeks, Facebook has given me the chance to catch up with the latest updates from relatives and friends here and overseas whom I haven’t heard for a long time. One funny experience I had was when I updated my marital status on 21 December 2012. Facebook ended up putting in my timeline that I got married on that day – popularly called as Doomsday! Well, I ended up getting all the funny comments from friends and relatives and hiding that particular event in my timeline.

Still quite hesitant to let my account open for browsing to the public, I set my privacy settings to options that I feel comfortable with, that is, setting the “who can see my stuff?”, “who can look me up?”, “timeline and tagging settings” to friends rather than the public at large. I also enabled secured browsing and login notifications for my security settings. However, I noticed that Facebook regularly changes/rearranges its privacy settings without giving any prior notice to account holders. For example, a month ago, I remember having the “timeline and tagging settings” with “who can see my stuff?” and “who can look me up?” as sub-options of “privacy settings” located under the wheel icon on the top right side of the screen. Currently, the “timeline and tagging settings” is located on the left side menu as a separate item from the privacy option which can be accessed by first selecting the privacy settings from the wheel icon. This change reminds me of a recent article (http://www.news.com.au/technology/facebook-founders-sister-tripped-by-privacy-settings/story-e6frfro0-1226543997014) about Facebook founder’s sister being not happy on Facebook’s privacy setting. Obviously,  Facebook need to do some balancing act and should be very careful when it comes to deciding on the privacy settings of its users or it could end up with the same fate as Myspace.

The last two weeks also gave me the chance to add more details with my LinkedIn account (http://au.linkedin.com/pub/eliezar-sarmiento/61/110/31a), explore more of the features of the program, sent some invitations to friends, and applied to join groups.