I am internet luddite when it comes to social networking tools, which all too often seem to waste a lot of time and to create additional secruity vulnerabilities . Nonetheless resisting Facebook is like Canute trying to hold back the waves and it has become a must use daily tool especially for the ‘younger generation ‘, which in my case means just about everybody.
Facebook recently announced features to give users more flexibility with their information, more control over how third parties access their data, and a new way to handle their social groups.
The company announced a new data portability initiative that lets users more easily move their information elsewhere. ; Facebook will allow you to download your wall posts, photos, videos, friend lists, events, and all manner of other details wrapped up in a zip file so that it can be archived or posted somewhere else.
Facebook is rolling out a new app dashboard to show which apps you’re using and what kind of information it accessed about you. This isn’t limited to Facebook apps—it includes the other websites that accessed your information through Facebook Connect. The dashboard can show you every API call made to your profile, and allow you to change permissions over time .
Facebook also announced a change to how users group their friends. In the past, only five percent of users categorized their friends into lists but 95 percent of Facebook users have been tagged in a photo, usually by their friends, which led to the idea of ‘friend groups’.
People will be able to add friends to a social group and then have group chats, document editing, and other group features that will be isolated from users’ main Facebook walls. If you don’t want to be part of a group you’ve been added to, though, then you don’t have to be. Zuckerberg said that you can leave a group and you won’t be asked to join it again unless you specifically request it. So, if you want to create a group for your family, a group for your sort-of-friend coworkers, and a group for your old college buddies, you can, and then keep all of those interactions separate.
The whole point of groups is to mirror the social groupings of people in real life,and will not replace friend lists .
