Facebook Can Take Instant Personalization and You-Know-What It

April 29th, 2010. By AbiK

We’re fans of Facebook. Or should I say “friends”. We like Facebook. And yes, LawyersAndSettlements.com also has a page on Facebook. But you won’t find what your BFF’s on Facebook “like” streaming on our site.

So why aren’t we embracing this Spirograph-like “open graph” concept? Five Reasons. Read on.

Reason One: Because we know you have a brain of your own. If you are interested in a certain legal topic or issue, you’ll go to it. Without your friend’s having to share the link on FB to prompt you. And hey, if they were really such good friends, wouldn’t they have sent you the link already if they thought you’d be interested?

Reason Two: We also know that you already have Google and Twitter and a whole bunch of other options out there that can tell you what’s popular or high-ranking in search. Oh, but as Mashable’s Pete Cashmore so aptly noted in a recent post at cnn.com, perhaps FB is jonesing to become the site “best positioned to rank the Web”.

Reason Three: It’s a privacy thing. We’re all on Facebook in our personal lives as well. We like to keep it intimate. Cozy. If we’ve shared it on Facebook, we’ve shared it on Facebook. Not on cnn.com’s homepage in some baton hand-off, website to website.

Reason Four: There’s something out-of-body about seeing your high school buddy’s name flashing before your eyes on the right side bar of cnn.com. It’s like some weird Warholian 15-minutes-of-fame thing—but isn’t in reality as you’re the only viewer seeing it. And it somehow stabs at the integrity of what you’re looking at…cheapens it a bit. It’s as though rather than having CNN on a wide-screen tv behind the bar you’re at, suddenly, cnn has pulled up a bar stool next to you. A little too…chummy. (Note, of the “50,000”+ sites who’ve adopted the new FB app, apparently news stalwarts NYT and WSJ have not…)

Reason Five: We’re finding—for ourselves—that most of the “friends” whose opinions we’d actually give a rat’s -ss about have opted out of Facebook’s new attempt at web domination. The mere fact that they had to dive into the depths of the veritable snake pit that the Facebook Privacy Settings are shows the lengths they went to—a sure sign that they did not “like” sharing their “likes”. Food for thought.

By the way, if you’re thinking that “opting out” of FB’s instant personalization option is a no-brainer, guess again. Intuitive it is not. Here’s how you do it. Go to your FB profile. Click on Account in the upper right. In the drop-down, go to Privacy Settings. From there, click on Applications and Websites. From there, uncheck the “Allow” box next to where it says, “Instant Personalization Pilot Program” (which FB had so graciously checked for you to begin with). Voila!

Oh, and hey—don’t forget to “like” us on Facebook!

Tags: Facebook, Internet Privacy, Privacy

This was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Emerging Issues, Internet/E-commerce . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.