Tag: social media

Anti-Social Media – Facebook Friend Lists

2 comments

An active user on Facebook would inevitably gather a large number of friends. Yet not all friends will share the same opinion with the user or even one another. So at times the wall postings end up a common battleground between friends on a different end of the divide. It also become a chore to do damage control and peace keeper among friends, and it becomes annoying and time wasting when certain idiots incessantly rant on without getting the point in ‘agreeing to disagree’ or ‘just shut up and shove it up the other end of their alimentary canal’.

Fortunately, with privacy settings and ‘friend lists’, you can now create lists so certain exceptionally pesky individuals can be shut out of your wall posts, or target wall posts and specific users. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate how to create ‘friend lists’, and how to manipulate the privacy settings in Facebook to deny your wall posts to certain users, or to deliver them to a group specifically.

This is exceptionally useful if you can’t stop yourself from the urge to say something about your colleagues or your employer, which might later come back to haunt you later or cause you to lose your job. Personally speaking, I would prefer no one say anything about his work on social media platforms be it Facebook or any micro-blogging facilities like Plurk or Twitter. After all, there is no reason to take the risk that Facebook won’t make certain changes which have the drastic effects of exposing stuff previously hidden from certain groups or individuals.

1. Click on “Account” on top right corner in Facebook, then select ‘Edit Friends’. This will load the ‘Friend Page’.
2. The ‘Friend Page’ is where Facebook recommend people to add as friends (usually friends of other friends), or where you can search the address books of Yahoo, Windows Live Mail etc for friends. Any list created will be on the left sidebar on the ‘Friends Page’. A truncated example of mine show here.
3. Assuming there were no list already created, click ‘Friends’ on the left sidebar to have all your friends listed. ‘Friends’ is the first item under ‘Lists’ on the left sidebar. When the browser finish loading the first page of friends, the following will appear on the top of the list (see below.)

Click to proceed with creating a new list.
4. A small window appears inside your browser. Give your list a name and select the contacts for this list and click ‘Create List’ when done.
5. The name of the list just created will appear on the sidebar. Click it to list check who are listed. Beside the names of contacts in the list, it will also indicate how many other list they are already in.
6. Having create all the lists required, click Home on the top right corner to return your feeds page. Then click in the box for add links or to input the status. Immediately below the input box, a set of icons will appear on the left, and small ‘Lock’ icon and the ‘Share’ button will appear on the right.
7. To shows default privacy settings, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon.
8. Click on ‘Lock’ icon and select ‘Custom’ to edit settings
9. Example: This is what I do if this wall posting should only be visible to the list named ‘Premier Soccer’ but hidden from ‘Island Paradise’. Do not that you do not have to type the full name of the list. Facebook will suggest it as you type in more letters.

To hide from a list is to explicitly deny it from viewing this particular wall post.

Click ‘Save Setting’ when you are done on who can and cannot view this wall posting.
10. To confirm list visibility before posting, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon again. Click ‘Share’ after you are sure this is what you intended.
11. To identify the a wall post’s visibility setting after it has been posted, look at the information displayed under it.

The example on the right shows the information displayed beneath a wall post visible to everyone. (Note: No ‘Lock’ icon at all!)
The example below shows the information of a wall post with visibility settings. Mouse over the lock to show visibility settings.(Note: Except indicate the list which this particular wall post is hidden from.)

Here’s a crazy idea that I thought up when discussing the above matter with a friend. Assuming that your girlfriend does not like you partying with a group of friends, you can now create a list for your girlfriend and mutual friends, and one for the partying gang. In your Facebook profile, you can then still share photos and comments with your otherwise ‘not approved’ activities with your partying gang without your girlfriend knowing.

Isn’t that cool?

Just ranting…

One comment

I had a conversation with a fellow blogger earlier today on Windows Live Messenger, and we talked about some bloggers being hard up for publicity events. In it I mentioned that such events may never obtain the kind of success locally as it had elsewhere.

For starters, I told him I felt that way because I ain’t really interested in such blogger’s events. I also have a very small social circle as far as bloggers are concerned so it is even more unlikely I will be invited. Most of my friends and acquaintances are known primarily through more conventional means – e.g. in gatherings and functions or from courses and friend / colleague introductions. I also have to admit my blog is hardly interesting nor does it have the reach and audience base to warrant any attention. Furthermore, I find certain people active in Internet PR or social media hypocritical, pompous, shallow and repulsive (and that feeling is mutual). It sometimes give one the feeling they are more interested in gathering personal power or pursuing a personal agenda instead of doing what they claimed to be doing.

Not being sour grapes here (since I was lucky to be invited to two of the events), it appears to me that all these publicity activities are not very successful nor useful anyway when one consider the effect of the event vs effort put into the event.

First of all, I see a lot of the same old faces attending these events and thus only they write about them. And surprisingly, the more well known local bloggers are normally never present in these events. One may argue that the objective is achieved more by the quantity and not necessarily by the quality of the bloggers invited. But some bloggers really wrote nothing meaningful or useful of the event. Many a time, when one look at their posts, their knowledge of the event / product is obviously questionable, not to mention also their main objective of attending the event. In the worst case scenario, the entire ‘report’ can sometimes be nothing more than an orgy of cam-whoring. And in one such example, the photos only caught my attention because of Wong Lilin, and by then my attention is no longer on the event itself.

As far as that particular event is concerned, the organiser can some what be blamed for giving the wrong impression to those invited. If I am not wrong, dk told me that Mediacorp and SPH thought a TV series is being launched and sent the reporters for entertainment instead of the ones for gadgets. In the end those reporters end up focusing on the celebrities who are present. But what sealed its fate is when whatever bloggers’ reports produced also failed to pass on the relevant information.

Now, that’s only one of the ways how a publicity event fails to meet its objectives. In some other cases it may simply be just attendees not even writing about the event after attending. You will come to know they are there but didn’t blog because you see them in the photos of other bloggers. And that shows another serious problem… what happens if they maybe the only people reading one another’s blogs actively and constantly, with not much real traffic beyond that?

Anyway, can we blame the bloggers for not blogging about the event when they also have a life of their own beyond? After all, it was never explicit that a blogger must write about the event after they have attended. But it is my considered opinion that failing to do so would defeat the objective of the event – i.e. to have bloggers participate in the publicity drive and to reach out to their readers.

So, the combination of freeloaders at events, the lack of quality reports from attendees, plus the possibility that everyone is only linking to everyone else who are present at the event, would be sufficient enough to kill such events locally.

Consider then.. how to build a reputation as some one who can effectively utilise this form of media, when sooner or later it becomes obvious to corporates and companies that the reach from this is not only negligible but their writings (just like my piece here) are really worth shit on their own to be of any good? Where only the bottom line matters, why should more money and effort be spent to take seriously such ‘outreach’ programs locally?