Facebook actually had it perfect back in the day. Unless you're my friend, you see nothing but my name and my profile picture. No crazy controls or rocket science.

What about the other half of the equation: if you're my friend, you see everything. Maybe I don't want that. Maybe I want only my closest friends to see certain information.

That's what I liked about the old Facebook, there was a deterrent to mass friending.

That is the really nice thing about this - it looks to be totally trickle down .. from a base setting to groups to individuals within those groups

What if you wanted to make your profile open? Facebook circa 2006 didn't let me do that—at least not in any way discoverable to me.

  Facebook is constantly pushing the envelope trying to get people to believe that
  they want to share absolutely everything with everyone –
  including the advertisers.

Your privacy settings are irrelevant with respect to advertisers. The targeting means you see ads targeting some aspect of your profile without advertisers getting your identity. This kind of ignorance in a post about how a social network should do things makes me stop reading and ignore the rest.

excuse me for a second .... it might not be direct sharing with advertisers but the more that Facebook cons you into sharing the more valuable your information is to Facebook as a way for advertisers to target their ads. So in effect the more you share your information with a growing pool of people the more advertisers gain in the process. It might be indirect but you are still provide fodder for the marketers and advertisers.

The quoted statement is false. You could have everything public, or everything shared with friends only, and it wouldn't matter with respect to advertisers.

Yes, facebook benefits if you share more on facebook. Similarly, every other website on the planet benefits more if you use it more.

A common idea is that facebook makes decisions based upon making money from advertising. Here, the accusation is that facebook is pushing people to be more public because of advertising money. First, facebook doesn't make decisions based upon short term monetary gain. Second, this is explicitly false, as I've already outlined.

I am not that impressed. It is still very inflexible. The one social network that no-one has really not heard about is NotePub, and that is also the one that gets it right, you can just define custom groups of people and can specify for every bit of information which persons and/or groups can see that info.

Custom grouping is too hard for the masses, so any social network that relies on that will continue to be the one nobody has heard about.

The WLN controls are actually a pretty good compromise in that they make it pretty easy and relatively clear to create the one differentiation that most people really want: real friends versus acquaintances.

I wish we lived in a world where people actually read the popup dialogs that popped up in front of them before clicking on "OK"...multiple times (a real experience that I witnessed that altered my perception of the masses completely). Unfortunately, we don't, and as the ones building the software, we have to deal with that (and often suffer when it comes to things like FaceBook that has has mass-adoption overlap).

I see your point, and agree, well said, but not all social networks/web apps should aspire to be the next Facebook, some of them should try to do something different, not necessarily for the masses.

I totally agree. Community has totally been lost in many of these "social" apps. The best social network I interact with is a motorcycle forum still running vBulletin.

I think the huge challenge in these sites is that they start off simple and targeted (like Facebook), then grow, and find they don't have a sane way to deal with that growth.

Of course, trying to solve it before you need to is just a pointless waste of time, because odds are very against you ever needing to solve it.

I agree with you that some of the best so-called social networks are the old-style web forums. Having run for a very long time I see more of a 'community' built around it that any social network and really isn't that what it is all about - being a part of a community?

I like the irony here:

Take a look at this paragraph.

"As you can see the Windows Live Network have done their best to make the privacy tools simple and easy to use and yet provide you with a sense of control over who can see what is happening in your activity streams."

It is just beneath the graph that is absolutely unusable and too hard to comprehense for well over 90% of the users. If Facebook had such privacy controls - everybody would bash them for making it overcomplicated.

It would be interesting if features and the amount of content produced by them scaled with the frequency of interactivity between contacts. WLN seems to draw just another arbitrary line. Although it has some flaws, using levels of shared knowledge in the form of questions to be answered to access content isn't a bad proposition either.