17 Comments »Today Facebook officially launched a beta version of the new publisher controls which enables users to publish to anybody. You can set custom privacy settings for every single post that you publish to your stream, making granular privacy settings even more widespread. Want to publish to everybody on Facebook? Now you can. Perhaps you only want to make a story visible to your friends that are in your “Family” friend list. That’s possible as well.
This is a direct attack on Twitter who currently has two options: public and private. This is honestly a huge move forward for publishing information. The privacy settings that you implement for each story will also carry over to the stream.get API call. One other interesting component of this feature is that you will be able to view all new friends’ stories that they’ve published with the privacy setting “everyone”.
Facebook has been taking one step after another to try to build in Twitter functionality within their system and I have to say that this new version of publishing is a huge step forward. Being able to post stories as inside jokes among a limited set of friends is extremely valuable. For example I have friends that found me through AllFacebook and some stories that I publish are more relevant to them.
This new model of grouping users and providing targeted publishing present a whole new set of possibilities for content publishing on the web.
this is cool, but it’s not up yet. Facebook still shows default publisher.
This update’s effects are still unsure because most of users don’t and won’t share their profile, which is a requirement for this to work. They may, however try to persuade new users to do that.
I’ve been waiting for this forever. Specifically I’d like this to work for apps that post to your wall. Right now, you can have an app either post or not post; you can’t choose which of your friends will see it. It’s all or nothing.
So, how do you get the new beta version?
When this happens for all of us, I will finally feel comfortable using FB for personal & business. I hate the feeling of posting business-type things on my FB for all to see. The minute controls will be great.
But now I’m puzzled, here’s an article from ReadWriteWeb, http://sn.im/kvns3, that is saying that the ‘everyone’ setting means everyone on the internet - not everyone of your current friends! That seems VERY intrusive.
Is this true??
Finally! I’ve been trying to figure out (without success) how to “attach privacy policies to different friend lists” ever since those Top Ten tips came out.
Seems that controlling access to your profile and feeds info according to Friend lists cannot actually be done — until now. Yay!
Nick, Since the beta is only open to people who choose to set their profile and status privacy to “Everyone”, can you help define what “Everyone” really means? Is my entire page content (except any new ‘locked’ posts) visible to non-friends?? I have no way of testing this.
I have been really wanting this exact feature for a long time, but now I do not want to give up my ‘friends only’ visibility. I have followed all of your Top Ten Privacy tips.
Will this also apply to fan pages?
Cool, so does this mean I’ll be able to customize each status to different people each time? I’ve asked for this many times! That’s great..
Is something like this planned for images as well? My basic setting is, that whenever I get marked on an image, only about 5-7 people can see those images. I would then love to be able to set them as public (which means public to all my friends, not everyone). Is this possible and I just didn’t see it yet? Is this planned?
i changed my settings for my status’s to be available to everyone. but i still don’t the options shown in the screen shot.
how do i participate in the publisher beta?
Where is Facebook’s “official” announcement?
Here it is: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=98499677130
thanx
I’d love it if someone could address some of our questions. Thanks!
When is this going to be out?
Am I the ONLY one who is able to use this new custom setting?? All my friends say they do not have this little “LOCK” icon to customize…why do I have it??