Video inspired by this post on Facebook today and this post on Google Plus

First, the fact that Facebook is holding profiles hostage for page linking purposes. This is making many angry (including me, for what it’s worth), and rightly so. They have effectively eliminated your control over your own profile, and the price you pay is a loss of your personalization. You know, that little part of your profile that helps people decide if you really are that chick from 6th grade science class, or if you are a work associate who is interesting enough to have in their stream, or where you can list your undying love of “alt indie grunge cupcakes”, among other things.

How are they holding it hostage? If you didn’t allow them to link to Pages in your personal Info tab when they made the change, you lose your interests, work, education, hometown and current city (you know, all of the criteria people use to find you). Even worse? They’ll still link you to pages of their own choosing, even if you try this trick suggested by Corvida. So far, it also seems you can not delete them from the Info tab interface – only hide them or go to each page and manually leave it. Frustrating and time consuming. (If you are my friend on Facebook, you can see I removed or hid all of my interests and replaced them with a link to the page Facebook Give Us Back Control Of Our Privacy, just to be cheeky.)

Also of interest if you are a business: Facebook isn’t ensuring that it is linking to the correct pages. I have this website for Uptown Uncorked, for example, and I’ve had a fan page for Uptown Uncorked for a very long time. Instead of linking there in my work section, Facebook is linking to its own new Community Pages feature, even creating a new community page for businesses and things that already have established presences. Some people seem to be able to suggest an URL when it’s incorrect, but I don’t have access to that feature, and neither do many others I’ve asked at this time. If I find a solution to that issue, I’ll update this post with it, as it is happening on my work, education, and other links now, and I see it happening to others. I used Corvida’s trick to avoid being linked, so it brings up the question: Is the URL correction link others see only available to those who give in to Facebook’s forced links to Pages? If you know, comment?

For more on the forced profile linking issue, I suggest reading this post on TechnoBuffalo about Facebook Taking Your Profile Hostage by Sean Aune

Moving on to the big picture issues surrounding Facebook’s Open Graph API. This particular move by Facebook has gotten the attention of Washington. Specifically, Senator Charles Schumer is questioning the privacy issues surrounding it, which you can read more about in a write up over at Read, Write, Web.

At the crux of the matter is Facebook’s tendency to make everything Opt-In by default, something they have done with nearly ever feature launch since early days (remember Beacon?). What this means to a tech savvy user is simply checking your privacy settings once a week and after every major UI (user interface) change and toggling the switches to off if you want to. No big deal to us. However, it is a huge deal to the less tech savvy user (which are legion), to the young and perhaps under-educated about privacy online, and to the super busy user. By making sure the changes and features are set to “On” by default, Facebook is doing a huge disservice to those who just want to log in and stay connected to friends and family, or do a little basic business. They could solve a lot of their core issues with users by simply defaulting to “Off”, truly. An online privacy bill making the rounds currently aims to force that default, however; it would broaden government’s reach into privacy issues and online commerce in ways that may not be beneficial. I’m currently on the fence on whether or not to support it, but you can read more about the bill’s progress over on Ad Age.

You can read a great tutorial on how to adjust your Facebook privacy settings over on GigaOm in the post “Your Mom’s Guide To Those Facebook Changes, And How To Block Them“.

What the Instant Personalization part of things means is that you can get social sharing plus friend streaming via Facebook all over the web. The trade-offs are related to your personal information and are explained in the articles I’ve linked to in much more detail than I can give space to here. Check them all out, then come back and finish reading.

As a person working in marketing as part of their overall job and a social media geek, I think the idea of social sharing all over the web is a lot of fun. I can attest that social sharing is something I do already using Shareaholic, Delicious, Google Reader, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and more (but not often Facebook). From a business standpoint, looking only at reach, social sharing of this Facebook level magnitude can only help you. From a user standpoint, it can be a little creepy. How so? Well, one of the biggest things you can do with the information gleaned from tracking social sharing is serve up appropriate ads to people wherever they are online. As a business, this will save time and money and be more effective as you target only those who are most likely to give a crap about your service or product. As a user, it feels a bit creepy to realize that a random website knows which product you are likely to give a crap about. Add in the terminology (it’s a “Like” button, or perhaps a “Recommend” if the web site owner has taken time to change it at all) and you get some very strange reactions from people. My recommendation for users is to use the Ze Frank recommended tool shown below to take a look at what Facebook is already sharing about you right now, adjust your privacy settings accordingly, go to your profile and make sure you are happy with what you are linked to, and then proceed to “Like” your little heart out once you’ve got your privacy ducks in a row. Just make sure to check the settings again weekly, just in case. Be proactive.

This post has a lot of information to absorb already, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of how Facebook is turning brand ownership on its head – whether it is your “personal brand”, as they say, or your business brand. If you want a quick sketch of one of the many ways this is happening on Facebook, take a look at the new Community Pages.

What these pages do is take topics (any topics) and turn them into a community generated page. The point is to make the topic, brand, person, etc be “community owned”. It’s intended for things like “cooking”, but open to anything people have a mind to add. This is scary for businesses, as these pages can be started by a business, but are not ultimately in the control of the business. They are intended for broader topics (right now) but since any topic can be made a Community Page and anyone can start one (and in fact Facebook used Wikipedia data to start several already), if you are a brand with public perception issues or problems, you could be facing some real heat, and without a traditional Wall interface for uploading content or commenting, no way to fight it on the Community Page itself. You’ll have to up your social media game and come out swinging elsewhere and hope it filters back to the passive areas online like these new Community Pages. Facebook being Facebook, I’m certain that will change at some point to something else, but for now, that’s how it’s been laid out.

With such an overwhelming amount of change happening at Facebook over the last little while, I’m interested in how it’s affecting you or your business. How are you handling it? Are you seeking out people in the social media space to come in and educate your business or school on privacy issues and branding online, on how to deal with the new frontier of connectivity and openness? Have you found a solution to some of the problems mentioned above that you can share in the comments? Let us know!

Why pick on Facebook when companies like Google have similar issues? Because Facebook’s mangling of user privacy is quite intentional, happens frequently, affects even those who don’t really ‘live’ online like some of us do; whereas for Google it is more a side effect of the services they offer than a purposeful business model, I think, and one that has a severe downside for them in a variety of ways. Think back to the Buzz launch recently and the issues and outcry that caused for Google. Because it isn’t their business model, but a side effect, they were quite quick to remedy the issue.

Facebook’s launch of what I’m thinking of as the ‘ubiquitous like’ puts user apathy, lack of internet education and the need for awareness front and center for me. Why user apathy? Think about it: how many of the internet users you know are proactive about checking their privacy settings on all platforms weekly, and again with every new change like the ubiquitous like, and diligent about reading those long, boring TOS (Terms of Service) and EULA (End User License Agreement) pages regularly (or heck, even just when signing on the first time)? Not many, right?

A lack of education and awareness about common internet practices, best practices and being proactive about your own basic online safety comes into play also. So many companies and educational institutions still don’t have even a basic social media education, much less any sort of social media or online guidelines for their employees and students. It’s appalling, and it’s creating and/or reinforcing a gullible, overly trusting generation of users who can’t figure out how to protect themselves, or worse, don’t see a need to.

Not knowing how much this apathy and lack of knowledge and awareness can affect you in terms of privacy and safety is the greatest cost on the internet right now for the end user. Each time you interact blindly online, it has a potential consequence, of varying degrees of import, no matter where you are. This is no different from real life interactions, but for some reason, people have trouble making the mental leap that there is no more great divide between online and offline life anymore. There is no separation of personal and professional, and things you share actually go a variety of places and programs to be sifted, studied, archived, stored, and used.

You might wonder why someone who has a strong social media component to my job would advocate for caution. That’s just it, I’m advocating for caution and awareness, not silence or lack of sharing! The engagement you find online has many more positives than negatives, but just like anything you do, inherent risks that you can take time to minimize.

On Foursquare? I am. I love Foursquare. Don’t check in a location alone. Simple common sense. Don’t leave your home unattended if you have ever checked in there and then go on a trip (though I’d recommend against home check ins anyway for safety reasons). Again, common sense. On Twitter? Having a public Twitter fight? Talking about your drug use? Crowing about cheating the tax man? Talking about how you evade your collection agent? All of that is indexed by Google and out there for all to see (and now also by the Library of Congress). Again, this is all common sense. On Facebook? I bet you haven’t checked your privacy setting in eons. Go to this post by GigaOm and check (and change) them right now. You may be shocked at what Facebook is tracking, all because apathy makes people not go back and make sure their privacy settings haven’t changed on a fairly frequent basis.

There are hundreds of social networks out there and they all have some benefit to users and to companies and organizations. the positives FAR outweigh the negatives – many of my business collaborators and close friends are those I’ve met online through three years on Twitter and time spent cultivating relationships on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But don’t be stupid about it, folks – just like in real life, look both ways before you cross the street, don’t take candy from strangers, etc. You learned everything you need to know to be safe online in kindergarten, I promise, you just need to be proactive about your own safety and privacy.

The basis for the book is the simple yet heady premise that your online profile will become your greatest asset as we march toward the future. It will be worth more than your house, your car, the status of your parents, your race, your gender, your monetary background, and more. Because of the way the online world (not just social media) works as aliving breathing resume, an extension of your whole life experience, it can be leveraged continually to direct the path of your life.

Some of the things we touch on in the book:

• Why we will have more online friends than offline friends
• Why we will give money to strangers and date people we’ve never met
• Why having a strong online presence will be critical to ones social and financial survival
• The value of eliminating traditional expectations
• The diminishing emphasis of the handshake and face to face interaction
• The decline of the traditional resume in favor of the living resume
• How it’s no longer about “First Impressions” but “Lasting Impressions”
• The expectation that any online activity could be a contribution to society and your future
• Why providing information on a “need to know” basis will no longer be acceptable
• The shift to a global economy and the need for an online presence to compete
• Why social media will be at the core of our daily lives
• Online presence as validation
• Wisdom and peril of the crowd
• Industry and technology trends and how they will affect you
• So much more… I’d have to disclose too much of the proprietary information in the book to list everything here, though.