If you’re a parent and noticed your kids were going to  CD5 before they GNOC in a post on Facebook, you should check out this list of social media terms that could help decipher a message they may not want you to know.

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People worry that timeline will put their entire lives on display or require a seemingly infinite amount of time to customize. Neither of these has to be true!

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Facebook is adding lots of new friends in Washington, D.C., if the company’s fourth quarter lobbying report is any indication.

Marking a Facebook first, the company’s lobbying budget broke through the million dollar ceiling last year based on the fourth quarter reports filed recently.

While the final 2011 lobbying figures will be reported later this month, estimates put the last year’s lobbying budget at $1.35 million.

Papers filed with the U.S. government Friday reveal that Facebook spent $440,000 on lobbying in the last quarter of 2011, up 30 percent from the same period a year ago and a whopping 85 percent increase over the $38,117 spent in 2009.

Facebook’s fourth-quarter lobbying budget was the most the company spent in any reporting period last year.

However, Facebook’s lobbying budget is still dwarfed by the amount spent by other major Internet and technology companies.

In comparison, Google spent $3.76 million in the last quarter of 2011.

The increased outreach to policymakers appears to be an industry trend.

Most tech companies — actually most companies and industry trade associations — saw a marked increase in their lobbying budgets in the fourth quarter of 2011 over the same period last year.

One reason could be the business community’s increased confidence in the economy.

Employment figures have been slowly ticking upward. And Congress is generally more active in the year before a presidential election.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s federal lobbying budget holds steady or grows in 2012. While the federal government — Congress, the White House and various agencies — will continue to work on issues like privacy, the real action this year will be in the presidential and congressional races, as well as local and state races.

So, how did Facebook spend a cool million in the nation’s capital?

Facebook may have laid the groundwork in 2011 for their recent victory against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

And the social network recently reached a much publicized deal with the Federal Trade Commission over the privacy of consumer data.

The social network also expanded its Washington D.C. office last year, adding top political talent. Additional staff generally portends more activity, and Facebook has been active on several fronts in 2011. The company participated in the recent Hackathon on Capitol Hill and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg met with lawmakers to discuss small business issues.

Facebook’s filing states that its representatives met with members of Congress as well as federal agencies, including the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of State, to name a few.

Topping the list of issues Facebook lobbied on were privacy, online security and safety. Specifically, the company names the Child Online Protection Act, mobile Internet access issues, the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights and the Do-Not-Track Online Act, as well as the Irish Data Protection Act.

Members of Congress are using Facebook in different ways –from buying ads to conducting town halls – -as a vehicle to boost engagement with constituents and expand their support online.  Facebook is still a relatively new platform on Capitol Hill, and the social network plans to educate lawmakers about how best to use the technology.

Update: A Facebook spokesman shared this statement with us via email:

Do you think Facebook should be spending increased amounts of money on federal lobbying?

Facebook elected not to go dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, unlike Google, which blocked out its logo, and Wikipedia, which actually went grey.

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What a year Facebook has had, at least when it comes to upgrades.

Changes to the site in 2011 have improved engagement, safety and monetization.

That said, here are the 10 most significant improvements that Facebook made in 2011, not necessarily in any order.

1. Timeline

Most people on Facebook have yet to upgrade their profiles to timeline, but those who have are raving about the depth of content in this advanced profile.

2. Inline Privacy Controls

Facebook moved most of the privacy controls to locations next to where people share content on the site. This strategy has spurred more people to avail themselves of these features than ever before.

3. Subscribe

Many have called Facebook’s subscribe button an effort to emulate Twitter, but this profile feature is quickly becoming a must-have for people who want to present themselves as thought leaders.

4. Immune System

This nickname for Facebook’s nickname for its security technologies cropped up inthe media this year, but the term immune system really sums up the collective effect of the bold steps the social network has made to dramatically reduce the frequency of  spamware, clickjacking and other digital maladies that used to crop up regularly. Some of the more significant moves have been:

• Partnering with Web of Trust has enabled the site to identify and block posts that include insecure web addresses;
• A social verification system provides a means of recovering lost passwords through trusted friends;
• Log-in approvals send code to mobile devices so users can authenticate attempts to access accounts from unrecognized machines; and
• Smart friend lists create groupings of contacts with things in common, all but forcing people’s hands to use this features for microsharing instead publicly posting everything for all to see.

5. GraphRank

Facebook has altered the method it uses for prioritizing content in the news feed on home pages. Although some people insist that the move from the old algorithm EdgeRank to the new one, GraphRank really has dramatically changed the content appearing on homepages — more targeted and engaging posts show up.

6. Ticker

The ticker has added movement to people’s homepages with the scrolling updates about all friends’ activity on the site, differing from the engagement-oriented news feed taking up the wider middle column.

7. Talking About This

Facebook’s revamped page insights include a really nifty metric visible to all: Talking about this. Showing visitors how many people are posting on Facebook about the page’s title may inspire more people to reshare content from that page.

8. Negative Feedback Metrics

Facebook has only just begun to test measurements of negative feedback on pages’ posts, which are based on what people put in their news feeds. This statistic has the potential to help page administrators greatly improve their content.

9. Sponsored Stories

Facebook’s best-performing type of advertisement, sponsored stories launched in January of 2011 and the social network subsequently created seven different variations on the promotion. All refrain an individual’s interaction with a brand to that person’s friends, the most popular variety telling people who likes the advertiser. The site plans to move these ads into news feeds starting next month.

10. Credits Incentives

This year Credits became mandatory for all applications that request payment in exchange for premium content, and developers that use the digital currency exclusively get a host of incentives that can help generate more income. These include:

• Get balance, which shows individual users’ balances to developers;
• Buy with friends, which encourages people to recommend purchases; and
• Frictionless payments, which enables gamers or shoppers to pay for goods without leaving the application.

What do you think were the most important upgrades on Facebook this year, readers?

Facebook and the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner publicly released the results of a detailed three-month audit of the social network’s privacy policies in the European Union region, but what steps did the social network agree to implement?

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Facebook’s changes to privacy settings have  resulted in a 93 percent drop in the number of status updates shared publicly — in the English language, that is.

The social network announced its move of the privacy settings to inline locations on August 23, but these changes took a while for people to get their heads around. Some of the controls didn’t show up for all users until the second week of September, which is represented in the chart by the green bar, the rate of status update sharing immediately declined as Facebook addicts opted-in to the update.

The major changes announced during the week of the F8 conference September 22 (represented the dashed red line) halted the slide, and sharing briefly increased. But changes gradually rolled out over the span of a month, and the continued slide in volume indicates that users confronted with the new options tended to adopt more stringent privacy settings.

It would seem that Facebook’s changes are curbing sharing. Our hypothesis is that it’s much more likely that this behavior is not going away so much as it is transforming, from status updates to “frictionless sharing.”

Applications and mobile access increasingly drive social sharing. As Facebook users read Washington Post news articles and listen to Spotify tracks on their iPhones, ticker entries broadcast their behavior to their friend networks.

This frees people up to share status updates only as they deem them fit for public consumption. Even as the new sharing methods enabled by open graph applications provide richer anthropological data, they are much more difficult, if not impossible, to collect for research.

Sharing services like bitly, Topsy, and ShareThis can facilitate understanding content consumption and distribution, but there’s no obvious substitute for harvesting unprompted consumer opinions

Readers, are you sharing more things privately than publicly on Facebook?

Guest writer Matt Pierson is the Senior Manager of Strategic Digital Analytics at Porter Novelli.

Editor’s note: The chart above includes a Hurricane Irene marker because the writer had thought that the privacy changes happened entirely in September, so the weather event was the originally proposed hypothesis for why public status updates dropped. I reconciled the facts in the story, but couldn’t remove Irene from the chart without spending more time in Illustrator than I have available for this.

Tinker with timeline and you can’t help noticing that your privacy defaults seem as if they’ve changed even if you haven’t touched them — the cumulative effect of many changes to the site all coming together.

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Facebook received its report card in the form of a detailed three-month audit by the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, and the social network’s grades were good enough to bring home.

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Tech blogger Robert Scoble does not agree with the perception that Facebook users don’t pay close enough attention to their privacy settings. He thinks thinks the polar opposite is true.
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