Posts Tagged: facebook

Technology — No Comments
23
Apr 10

Facebook wants to share your information without your knowledge!

As of today, there is a new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-Facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow”.

According to Facebook:

“You’ll find a personal and social experience the moment you arrive on our select partner sites — Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp. We’re working closely with these partners so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information. When you arrive on these sites, you’ll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page.
You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by “No Thanks” on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites.”

To disable this feature, go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization and uncheck “Allow”.

(Thanks Arun Pattnaik)

Technology — 4 Comments
3
Sep 09

Why tweets are more social than Facebook updates

“Status updates”, though meant to share what one is doing, are not really taken by their literal meaning. People use status updates in a variety of ways, including sharing links, breaking news etc. However, I observed a fundamental difference between how Facebook and Twitter updates spread on the web. An interesting comparison can be drawn between the two:

1. On Facebook, the “Share” link is only present for status updates which include a sharable resource (say, a URL, video etc.) and not for simple text-only updates.

Why did Facebook choose to do this? Why isn’t there an option to “re-feed” someone else’s status update into your own feed? Comparing this with Twitter, quite a lot of re-tweets are not necessarily about sharing video, URL’s etc., implying that this use-case definitely exists.

2. I generally post a lot of interesting videos and URL’s into my Facebook feed, because I surf a lot and often come across interesting content which is worth sharing. But, anyone can “Share” my post with their own network, without giving me any credit as the original source of the content.

I feel hurt, I feel cheated… almost as if someone “stole” it from me. If I’ve posted something interesting, you’re supposed to “Like” it or post a comment on it. If you must steal, the least you can do is credit the source! If you can be a good boy on Twitter (by including “RT @gauravgupta” in the tweet), shouldn’t you be able to do this on Facebook too?

Comments and feedback welcome.