First off, some background. I’m a ‘power user’ who often exercises the features of software services to their limit, and so Google and Facebook often add me as an early adopter to many of their features (Google is nice enough to ask permission; Facebook just adds me to their beta group without asking me — really bad etiquette).

So for a few weeks now I’ve been using the ‘New’ Facebook before most people saw it. It was buggy, and worked slightly differently than what is live now.

They have a new feature called ‘Subscriptions’. It’s basically a way to allow public posting of your status updates — sort of like blog posts or Tweets, these are people who aren’t your friends will automatically see.

When I first was presented the ‘new’ Facebook interface a few weeks back, it asked me if I wanted to turn on ‘Subscriptions’ (it didn’t explain how it worked or anything). I turned it on not knowing what it was. Back then I tried to turn it off afterwards but could find no way to do so.

Then, without really telling you about it (at least, not that I recall) Facebook changed the way your status updates work — by default (at least for me), the status updates are ‘public’, meaning anyone who subscribes to your ‘public’ feed can see your status updates. Essentially, at this point, if you don’t take extra steps to limit the scope of who can see your status updates to ‘friends’, you are friends with the entire world.

If you’ve turned on ‘Subscriptions’ without really realizing the impact of this move, this screenshot shows how you turn it off (click the two images on this post to enlarge them).

I’m not sure if this is technically a privacy violation (I’m sure they’re updated fine print in their legal text says essentially “we don’t guarantee anything is private”) but it is sure something to give parents pause.

The issue is that Facebook is so confusing and poorly managed that users can easily opt into settings which are contrary to what they want. On a related note, I am becoming increasingly concerned that Facebook has no interest in allowing any parental controls of any kind — parents cannot control these features if their child has an account — there is no ‘parent admin’ role. Facebook clearly does not have the safety of children in mind.

Facebook is totally bungling their customer experience. There are some many examples of this. One glaring example is that some things can only be changed via ‘Edit Options’ at the bottom of the page, which is hard to get to because, if you scroll down, the pages dynamically retrieves more status posts, meaning it’s a race against time to scroll to the bottom of the page. If you’re too slow, you’ll NEVER be able to get to this feature. A very bad experience which is effectively reducing your control over your privacy.

My personal theory is that Facebook is so afraid of the explosive growth of Google+ (a Facebook competitor) that they are rushing features out without sufficient testing — a very bad idea.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this issue — Google+ isn’t perfect (they’ve had privacy issues too — remember Google Buzz?) but in general Google is better managed and is a company I trust more in such matters. So I recommend considering adopting Google+ and giving it a go. It will take a while before enough folks are on it to make it viable, but Google has the smarts to make things easy and intuitive.

Here’s how to sign up for it: https://plus.google.com/up/start

You shouldn’t need an invite at this point, but if for some reason you do, drop me an email at stanshinn@gmail.com and I’ll send you one.

The io9 article makes the point that the motivation comes from the origin story saying: “as [Gail] Simone [writer of Birds of Prey and Secret Six] puts it, the point of the origin story isn’t really to explain how the hero got his/her powers, it’s to explain ‘what they most desire, what they most fear. The best origins, like Spider-man’s, Batman’s, and the like, encapsulate the character’s reason to exist. The worst merely explain that a drum of radioactive waste fell on their head and now they can fly.’” (source)

I also liked what a reader of the article said in the comments section:

The ‘super’ of ‘superhero’ is much less important than the ‘hero’ component. (source)

http://swshinn.com/writing-tips/autopost-to-facebook-and-twitter/

Once you’ve done the above, you can post to WordPress blog and it will echo out to both Facebook and Twitter.

Next, manually connect Twitter to your Buzz. Here’s how:

Log in to Gmail. When you click “Buzz” and then click “Connected Sites”, you’ll see the source manager; this lets you control permission levels for each source (in other words, you can set it so that your posts via Twitter are shared with certain people as opposed to your default privacy settings). [Note: controlling this was pretty un-intuitive. You’d think you could get to this under “Settings”, but you can’t. Bad design.]

That’s it! Enjoy.

In the meantime, here’s some Power User Tips:

TWITTER TO BUZZ
You can manually connect Twitter to your Buzz. When you click “Buzz” and then click “Connected Sites”, you’ll see the source manager; this lets you control permission levels for each source (in other words, you can set it so that your posts via Twitter are shared with certain people as opposed to your default privacy settings). [Note: controlling this was pretty un-intuitive. You’d think you could get to this under “Settings”, but you can’t. Bad design.]

@REPLIES
When you’re entering a comment, your @reply will add people to the post and deliver it to their inbox.  For example, type in “@mary” and you’ll see a list of matches. Note that while this makes it “private”, it appears that that person can share your comment with others much as an email may be forwarded, so beware this loophole.

FILTERING
If you’re a power user already using Gmail filters, note that your regular email filters will apply to Google Buzz messages, so you can control what types of messages you see.

BUZZ DOCUMENTATION
Finding the Buzz documentation was a bit of a chore, so I included the direct link here:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=27291

This mini-tutorial assumes:

1. You have a Facebook “page” set up and a Twitter account.
2. You have a blog set up on your own domain (mine is swshinn.com) and it uses WordPress software to manage the site.
3. You (or someone you know) knows how to FTP into your site and install WordPress plugins (it’s really not that hard — Google search to find many tutorials on this).

Step 1: Getting WordPress to automatically post to Twitter

Download and install the “YOURLS: WordPress To Twitter”  plugin:

planetozh.com/blog/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter-a-short-url-plugin/

Once installed and activated, configure these settings:

1. Under “URL Shortener Service” pick a service. I use TinyURL.
2. Under “Twitter Settings” enter the login and password for your Twitter account.
3. Finally, check the box that says “  Send a tweet with the short URL”. This means that every time you submit a blog post, this WordPress plugin will automatically make a short URL for your blog post (in my case, generating a TinyURL) and post the entry to your Twitter account.

Here’s a screenshot of my settings (click the image to enlarge it):

YOURLS WordPress To Twitter Plugin

Step 2: Getting Facebook to automatically list your new blog posts

Assuming you have a Facebook “page” (I’m not sure it would work with a normal Facebook account or Facebook “group”; and most authors prefer the “page” features), here’s how you do it.

1. Click on the link to “Edit” your page.
2. Then on the settings page that appears, under “Notes Settings” on the right, it gives the option to “Import a blog.” Click that link, and then enter the URL for your WordPress blog’s RSS feed (by default, this is “http://yoursite.com/feed”).
3. Click on “Start Importing.”

You’re done!

In the future, when you post to your WordPress blog, WordPress will tweet your post to your Twitter account, and Facebook will grab the entry and post it under your Facebook page notes. Note that Facebook may take a few minutes (maybe even an hour or more) to grab your blog post, so be patient.

If you liked this article, add me as a “friend” on Facebook and Twitter!:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/S-W-Shinn/197734288134

http://twitter.com/swshinn