Managing Facebook: A World Divided

So, over the past week, my Facebook privacy settings have been the subject of conversation in a few places: In person at dinner, then again at a breakfast…On Twitter… On my blog comments and of course, on Facebook itself.

Facebook has always been an odd place for me. It’s the only place, really, where my ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds collide. Sure, some people I know from my ‘offline’ life are now on Twitter, or have connected through LinkedIn, but for the most part, Facebook is the place where those people are interacting with me. And I love that. It’s nice to have a place where my ‘offline’ world can gather and interact – pictures, wall posts, notes and everything. All of the people who I get together with for dinners, who my wife and I double-date with… who we go out with and have over… Plus past co-workers from my pre-web life… and old high school friends… It’s my spot for all of that.

But it’s also where a lot of my ‘online’ friends gather, too. While we’re all over Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed and who knows how many other networks, we’re in Facebook, too – so it’s expected that I’d be there for this type of activity, too. And this leaves Facebook right in the middle.

Now, several of my friends are stuck in this same boat… And to the best I can tell, there are three solutions. You either split your list by creating a second profile, you simply accept that the worlds are going to collide, or you try to manage it all under one profile using privacy settings. I chose to do the later and did so using friend ‘groups’. Here’s how:

[table id=2 /]

First, I divided my world into two groups (I’ll talk about the third in a bit) – ‘Personal’ (Represented in light green below) and ‘Web’ (In the teal-like colour). The rules were pretty straight-forward: If we initially met because of offline activities (high school, work, friends of friends, former customers of mine and so on) OR if we met online but you’ve worked your way more into my personal life (AND are local – the people I could just go hang out at a coffee shop or bar with) you were personal. Everyone else was web.

After I had my divisions , I broke them up even further. The personal group was divided into 4: All Access (For the absolute closest people in my life – they get to see everything because I don’t hide much – if anything – from them, Family (Which is pretty self-explanatory), Personal Friends (For people I regularly see, hang out with and talk to) and Acquaintances (For people I’m still connected to but don’t really often ever talk to). The web side broke into two: Trusted Web, and Web – with the divider essentially being people who WOULD meet the criteria for personal friend, but they aren’t local and we met online.

I then broke down every setting Facebook would allow me to split up by group and handed out access to each group. It took a lot of tweaking (Probably about 3 hours total) – but in the end, every person belonged to a single list, and each list had it’s powers and privileges. I did the exact same thing with application settings, too.

But what about the ‘Limited’ groups? Well, they’re mostly there for decor right now, but they’re set up as more of a ‘step down’ type of group. If someone gets on my bad side, or I want to block someone without actually blocking them, these two groups give me the ability to do that. I also use ‘Limited’ as a sort of training period – somewhere I place people who want to connect with me, but I don’t know off-hand and don’t have time to look into.

The groups also give me the ability to ‘promote’ or ‘demote’ people between levels. For example, someone I meet online who’s local… but that I begin hanging out with regularly, could easily move from ‘Web Friends’ to ‘Personal Friends’ jumping not only lists, but sides as well.

An alternate method I’ve seen used is the “no” groupings. Setting up lists called “No Basic Info”, “No Personal Info”, “No Status And Links” and so on… This would let you take a person, add them to whichever groups you need to, and control information on a very specific level. Not something I’m interested in right now (That would be VERY time consuming to set up and maintain) – but it’s something I may keep in mind for later. A hybrid could work well – say, a “Personal Friends” and “No Home Address” pairing as an example.

A few notes

• Yes, ‘Personal Friends’ and ‘Family’ look the same in that chart… and for the most part, they are. My ‘Family’ group has more application access, though –  specifically to things like family tree apps.
• Very few people get to see who I’m friends with – in fact, between the two groups who CAN see them, I’ve got 4 people. I’ve had some mixed run-ins sharing friends with everyone… So I’m a little shaky handing that one out.
• Yes, ‘Acquaintances’ and ‘Limited’ are the same. These groupings are currently ONLY for an easy distinction on my side – but can also be used later to redefine privileges without having to re-group everyone.

It’s Not Perfect

… But no system is. There’s a lot of stuff lacking from the privacy controls – and a lot of stuff that could be (and should be) super-easy to implement. Actions (joining groups, fan pages), for example are missing – and there’s no way to control who can comment on things. For the most part, though, this system has been working well for me to allow me to keep both lives in one place and under a single sign-on. We’ll see how that changes in time.

How do you have your Facebook set up?