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Winston is the smartest person in our family!

Facebook is monetizing “web 2.0″ by selling targeted ads- i.e. ads that use the data on Facebook to create custom tailored ads for each person. Google does similar things with Adwords and even the ads they place in Gmail. This kind of advertising has the potential to be extremely rotten (i.e. previous Facebook scandels where your friend’s Amazon purchases might be shared with you), or they can be an effective and lightweight way to advertise (no more annoying pop-ups).

In typical Facebook tradition, for my Birthday my wall was plastered with best wishes from friends and family- and I can only assume this is why I received the banner ad that was at the top of the facebook page. The ad features my family members- and lists their IQs (which I’m 100% sure are fake), then ranks them accordingly. The target of the ad is at the end where my name and picture are listed with question marks for my IQ- obviously trying to get me to install the Facebook app and do better than my family (impossible).

What really made this a flop, and quite amusing, is that they ranked Winston, my pet dog, number 1, above Bethany, who is finishing a Master’s degree at the University of Maryland in the time it takes most people to get an Undergraduate degree, Devi who is fluent in Chinese, and my mother who is CEO/President of a company! Now, I realize that Winston went to Oxford, and has a snooty English accent, but he is only 3!

Nice work Facebook- a classic Facebook ad for my birthday!

Note: Click on the picture to see it in it’s orginal size in a lightbox!

In a recent post, I described a new condition that is rapidly spreading around members of the internet population whose definition of the word privacy has not yet been updated in an age of instant information availability. Well, that sounds kind of insulting, really I mean that their foundational understanding of what privacy was developed in a time without instant information availability and therefore they have a natural (and understandable) anxiety of tools that provide personal information instantly, especially like Facebook. While I hope to start a somewhat long running discussion on what privacy means, today I hope to give you guys a remedy to FAD in the hopes that you will be able to reduce the symptoms of FAD.

Protect yourself on Facebook with the following steps:

Step one: on the top of Facebook, go to the settings tab, and a drop down menu should appear, select “Privacy Settings”. Under profile you can control exactly what other people see when they visit your profile. Make sure that you have some basic stuff available to all friends (but not friends of friends), but here is an interesting tool. Select customize, and you can set groups who can only see your status updates, and some other features.

Step two: Create groups! Categorize your friends, here are some basic ones: work, family, close friends. Allow family and close friends access to all of your things: profile, pictures, applications, status, etc. Don’t let your work group access anything- especially not pictures- except for things that you are happy to have public. If you don’t want to create groups, use the Limited Profile group- which is a default Facebook group that only lets the folks in that group see a limited amount of your profile. Until I set specific permissions, I stuck most folks into this group.

Step three: Control your newsfeed: Again under privacy settings you can tell Facebook which “stories” you want published to your news feed. Customize this to your comfort level, but note, only your friends can see your newsfeed.

Step four: Sick of seeing stuff on the newsfeed from people you don’t even know? Well customize the settings of your news feed. Scroll down to the bottom of the newsfeed (that’s the main page list of everything that your friends have done recently, and click on “Options for News Feed”. Its hard to find because Facebook uses the newsfeed for advertising. You can then scroll down or up the frequency of various stories, or add friends you want to hear more about, or friends you want to hear less about. Have someone who is annoying because they are constantly on Facebook and therefore on your newsfeed? Add them to the hear less about list, and they will stop bothering you.

Step five: Edit the notifications you receive from Facebook. Turn off the emails: this is again in the Facebook settings section- if you don’t want to get emails constantly, tell Facebook what emails you want to get. Beware though, it is easy to miss things like comments on photos if you aren’t alerted to them via email.

Other Suggestions:

At this point you should have the basic privacy settings set to a level that should decrease your FAD symptoms. But there are some other things you can do:

Use Facebook on your mobile or Blackberry. There are specific Facebook applications, or you can just use your browser to go to m.facebook.com. Because of limited bandwidth issues, Facebook mobile is much more lightweight than the web version.

Search for applications that are specific to what you want to do on Facebook, remove all others- if you don’t want it, don’t join the group or accept the group invitations.

Add twitter to Facebook and then you don’t have to be on Facebook all the time, you can use other Social Networking sites just as effectively. Also, see a future post on Flickr. Facebook can be used as a portal for all these sites.

Get a chumby! This is basically the same thing as using Facebook on your mobile. It makes Facebook more lightweight and less intense.

Finally, always do the following:

If you don’t know the person, don’t friend them. There is no consequence of ignoring a friend request, the person isn’t notified that you ignored them, in fact they won’t even realize unless they are truly trying to friend you for some reason.

Ignore application/group/event requests that don’t apply to you. Don’t pile on your Facebook by just accepting everything. Many times applications ask people to select 20 people to send an application invitation to, and people just select the first 20. If your name starts with B, that can be particularly annoying…  But they don’t care, they just wanted the app, and they didn’t want to ignore the friend invite portion. Don’t worry about ignoring it.

Don’t ignore messages! Messages on Facebook are like emails- treat them as such.

Hopefully with these tips you will be able to minimize the effects of FAD on your internet lifestyle! Of course, I am available for personal counseling and FAD treatments if you need me- just friend me on Facebook, but don’t be surprised if I ignore you because I don’t know you!

Recent conversations have let me to the realization of the existence of a new social/medical disorder that seems to have only recently spread amongst the adult and non-collegiate populations of the world. I’m talking about Facebook Anxiety Disorder, more commonly known as FAD, and it is a serious condition that we need to cure soon! If you think that you or a loved one has FAD, and then please speak to a doctor or a blogger as soon as possible. FAD is treatable, even if there is no cure. To minimize your risk of FAD, please post this blog on your Facebook profile and share it with at least 20 of your Facebook friends…

FAD, simply put is the anxiety related to Facebook. You know that you are exhibiting the symptoms of FAD when you start to ask yourself questions like the following. Why do I care what the heck my high school friends who I haven’t spoken with in 20 years are doing every second of the day? Is everyone else on Facebook at least once an hour except me? Who is this person that just friended me, should I accept their friend request? When did friended become a verb? Will my boss see those drunk pictures from my birthday party? Should I put contact information on my profile? And finally, is there any way to gag myself with this f****** news feed?

If you exhibit any of these symptoms then you have FAD. The root cause of FAD is a genetic resistance to a new definition of the word “privacy”. Privacy has a slowly evolving definition (exhibited by changing contexts in the OED). In recent studies it has been shown that the initial users of Facebook- internet savvy college undergraduates have a different idea of privacy than the social/legal definitions that are currently in the vocabulary of basically everyone else. Those internet savvy college undergraduates participated in “network socialization” meaning that they had a regional view of their Facebook network- their college campus. Indeed, in the initial versions of Facebook only allowed you to be in one network and to join that network you were required to have a campus (.edu) email address. These college students were interested in meeting new friends, finding connections between their existing friends, and figuring out what any one person or group was doing at that specific time to facilitate the interactions of the network. Basically every default application that comes with Facebook is meant to lubricate the social networking of a college campus.

But you, with FAD, are not in a college campus. In fact you are not in a regional network either via geography or time. The result is that your Facebook friends span both time and space and all the social facilitation that was once applicable in a regional setting don’t translate to a global one, and that causes anxiety. While there is no cure, there is a treatment. For college students it was to change their definition of privacy. For you, it needs to be a change in the way you use the privacy settings of Facebook.

Here are two typical responses: friend no one, friend everyone but avoid contact. Here is the thing with Facebook it is a non-intimate social setting. Email, phone, SMS these are all intimate network technologies. Facebook should not be. The first response, friend only those you want to use Facebook is a very good response- but it eliminates the ability for you to contact people you are acquainted with in a non-intimate manner (intimate meaning that you have communication obligations). The second response eliminates all other applications of Facebook. The middle ground is to use privacy settings, groups, and management of applications to make Facebook work for you and therefore eliminate FAD.

This blog is getting long, so I will get into specifics in a later blog. Just know, there is hope for FAD, and I will give you the tools to treat it!