Facebook to Expose your Profile to Google
5 09 2007 
Facebook is changing. I’ve been pretty resistant to be active in Facebook (oh no, another network to maintain?), but after all the pokes and invites, I recently gave in and started using Facebook more regularly.
There are social networks consisting mainly of people that you know (LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster) and social networks built upon people that you primarily don’t know (social news type sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg). Both sides are the key to your success in professional networking, and yes - even promoting your blog.
The big news today is that Facebook is dramatically changing its privacy settings.
If the reason that you use Facebook regularly is its privacy, change your public profile settings right away. So, if you don’t want to be listed in the search engines at all, just uncheck the second box in the My Public Search Listing section
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Seeing these settings is definitely sobering, as I set mine to be super-restricted not a month ago. It seems whenever they add options, by default they are as open as they can be. However, when you take into consideration that they have no ads (hmm… could they be selling personal information?) it all makes sense.
@dan: many sites try this sort of “open as you go” pattern. As far as no ads, I often see skyscrapers on the left - not sure which version of Facebook you’re using
Most of the promotions I see are in-network promos or ‘announcements’ of movies, etc that are upcoming. In terms of something like… “Domain names, 6.99 ea while supplies last” (0.o)? don’t appear.
@dan: once you are the size of a Facebook, you don’t need those little domain ads.
Examples:
-icanhascheezburger.com (yes, that lol cats site) fetches about $5,000 a month for just one of 4 tiny ads.
-Friendster gets $883 a week just for a text link.
How much do you think those little ‘announcements’ make now?
Doesn’t mean they don’t sell your info
@dan: perhaps. From Facebook’s privacy page:
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
I have to admit - I am surprised. Unpleasantly so - well, no time to waste - off to Facebook to change my settings.
[...] I wrote about privacy concerns in which Facebook will be opening up user profiles to search engines such as Google. Many people are choosing to limit their public profiles, and understandably so. However, if you [...]
I recently signed up with Facebook, just about the time I got things going with Linked In. This news tells me that I’ll want to spend more time with the latter, not the former. Thank you for sharing.
@matt: not necessarily. It all depends on what you’re using your profile for.
I logged onto facebook from a computer at school and low and behold, there were ads.
Turned out that I blocked all the ad companies in my HOSTS file centuries ago and didn’t think about it at the time of my previous comments. ^_^
@dan: lol, nice one