The Complete Idiot's Guide To Facebook

You hang out in different social circles – friends, family members, colleagues, and acquaintances to name a few. Or you may have a trusted and not-so-trusted circle – Facebook friends you know and trust, and others you’re not really sure about. You don’t always want to share with everyone. Your mom doesn’t need to know about that wild night out you had with your friends, and you probably don’t want to announce to mere acquaintances that you’re going to be on vacation and away from your home for the next two weeks.

The solution? Create a separate friend list for each of your social circles.

With separate lists, you can share information selectively. Here, I explain how to do it. (Note: you can also use these techniques to share with or hide information from individual friends.) (more…)

It’s been a good week in FarmVille. Your friends helped you build a horse stable and a larger chicken coop, you joined a co-op and now you’re rushing to plant a field with strawberries because — like they say — “everything grows in FarmVille,” even if it is mid-October.

But there are storm clouds on the horizon for users of this real-time simulation game developed by Zynga and available as an game on Facebook. The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported that popular applications (also known as “apps”) and games like FarmVille have been transmitting players’ names — and even their friends’ names — to advertisers and outside companies.

The WSJ story said the top 10 most popular applications have been transmitting personal information about users to internet tracking companies. Worse yet, some have been forwarding a user’s “friends” list to these advertisers. Facebook’s 500 million-plus users all have access to such games and the Journal said this privacy issue affects millions of them who sign up for such online activities. And apparently no one is safe from such disclosure, the WSJ says, even those who go out of their way to set their Facebook settings at the highest privacy level.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been under fire for the occasional security breach for users’ information. The company was quick to announce Sunday that it is (more…)