Skype and Facebook sitting in a tree? All Things Digital reports that Facebook and Skype are on the verge of announcing an integration of their services, allowing Facebook users to talk to each other. The news comes with a mocked-up screenshot provided by the omniscient "sources close to the situation". It also dishes that Facebook users will able to send SMS …
I try to keep my home contacts and personal contacts separate, but it is difficult when you network with youngsters that publish everything that they do.
Nobody under the age of 25 that I've met can tell me why privacy is important. It just isn't something that is valued by people that had cellphones as children.
I felt old when a teenager asked me why I still use email instead. Hotmail users are very much middle-aged now.
aaargh. I don't want to lump everyone in one bucket. I have work friends, and friends from school, and drinking buddies and the three should probably never overlap if I want to maintain my job or credibility
Yet Facebook insists that they should and that I have no control
Little wonder I just use it to play Farmville and stick to real email to keep in touch with people.
The idea that all my contacts are equal is what prevents facebook being a useful addressbook where my contacts maintain the details.
Without being able to maintain seperate groups of contacts with different privacy and contact options is what prevents facebook being used for anything other than mindless time drains.
Err... you can!
Familiarise yourself with the concept of "Friend Lists" and Custom privacy settings. Once you've got friend lists set up, it isn't too complicated to determine who sees what in your profile (so, for example, personal friends would see more than colleagues, since they're more likely to know your education history etc. anyway).
Unfortunately, the problems occur when when sending messages: the only way you can restrict messages to specific friend lists is to click on the padlock icon, choose Custom, and type the name(s) of the friend list(s) into the box.
It would be so much nicer if Facebook realised that people have different social circles (not just one big grab-bag one), and the custom privacy options could be integrated into the main box (Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends, Only Me), and it would be nice if a default privacy level could be set for each type of post (e.g. posts from FarmVille only go to people in my "Farmers" friend list, so the rest don't get spammed with application messages).
But they'd probably think doing this would make it too complicated for newbies... :(
Facebook has exactly that kind of granularity in it's privacy settings. I've separated people out into different groups (workmates etc) and can control exactly what individuals see.
Plus I have a policy that I never have line management (or anyone above a certain level within the company I work at) added to my Facebook. Makes life much simpler.
As for "friends from school", most of those I haven't seen for twelve years or so. Once I realised most of them didn't care much about properly keeping in touch (and in some cases, neither did I), I just deleted most of them.
They just don't get it do they, just like they didn't get it with ebay. Nobody likes every frickin thing integrated with everything else. Just like any fool could have told them buyers and sellers don't want to 'talk' to each other on ebay,
If you want to speak to somebody on FB, you give them your Skype ID. Bit like giving them your phone number.
I love how they want to integrate everything, and with the other hand they stop you from viewing say, a movie trailer because "you're in the wrong region". Global village my bum.
Give it up Skype, nobody is interested. Why don't you do something useful like set up a customer service department and create an android app, if Apple will let you that is. ;o)
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