OK, I'm probably a little more paranoid than 95% of the population, so it's no wonder that I haven't posted pictures of my family through Facebook for my friends to see.  I've had this fear that if I post galleries to Facebook, they're visible to more than just my trusted group of friends.  Part of the problem is that I'm still learning the ropes at Facebook after more than a year of using it and I'm not quite sure how visible galleries are.  I know I can see images from the galleries of my friend's friends, at least when they've posted a comment on an image; but how far down the chain does this go?  To my knowledge there's no way to track this.

Well, it turns out that my fears weren't unfounded. 

I downloaded the latest version of Xobni this evening because I was interested in seeing the latest addition of their Facebook integration.  What I found surprised me.  As I scrolled through my email, I could see the latest gallery images of anyone with a Facebook account; and when I click on any of the images, I could see the entire gallery.

Moreover, if an exact match isn't made, the Xobni interface shows you a list of best guesses returned from Facebook; and, you guessed it, you can view the recent gallery images from any one of the strangers that appear in this list.  And not just the galleries, but the users latest status message as well.

Business or Personal Use

This brings me to a question that I've been wrestling with for a while now, especially with Facebook.  Should I accept invitations from business associates on Facebook?  Up until recently, this hasn't been a problem since most of my business connections have been made through LinkedIn.  The problem with LinkedIn, though, is that their API is not public and after 3 attempts at getting information from the LinkedIn alias configured for developers to request access to the API, I have yet to receive a response. 

Contrast this with Facebook, which has not only a mature application API, but it also has the Facebook Connect API, which I believe meets some of the basic demands that organizations have for interacting with a social networking application.  As I see it, there are 3 main advantages to Facebook Connect for any kind of member-based organization:

• Identity is handled in a way that has even the OpenID community drooling.  Not only is the connection process simply, but unlike Google's Friend Connect, you can actually integrate it with your existing login and registration processes.
• Friends come with you to the site.  Facebook makes it really easy to view friends that are already a member of the site as well as invite friends to become members of the site.
• Activities or stories from your site can be published back to Facebook, for all of your members friends to see.  I don't think I have to explain how powerful that is.

Until a LinkedIn API is publicly available, I'm afraid we will see Facebook make serious inroads into the professional community.  The numbers are certainly on Facebook's side with over 100 million users compared to LinkedIn's 35 million users. 

The issue for Facebook, though, is that there is currently no good way to separate personal and business use of the platform.  I understand Mark Zuckerburg's commitment to only one account per person; but if that constraint is going to be placed on users, there should at least be a way to create friend groups so that permissions can be assigned at the group level for features such as applications or galleries or even posts and comments.  [Update - Michael pointed out in the comments that Facebook has friend lists, which looks promising.  More about it here¹.  But you still need to be careful when friends tag you in photos that they've shared with everyone (the default)]  Consider the profile, which is a basic aspect of the system.  It asks for your political and religious preferences and under interests allows you to specify that you're looking for things like random play.  I had no idea what that meant until I saw it listed on a friend's profile.  After I looked it up, I was pretty sure they didn't know what it meant either. 

The Social Media Wild West

Yes, there's a certain level of danger associated with the wild new frontier of social media, but at the same time there's tremendous opportunity.  Here are some guidelines I try to follow when participating in any social networking or social media platform. 

• Don't post anything you wouldn't be comfortable having the whole world see... 
• Forever.
• Be careful to censor images where you've been tagged.  In most social networking applications, you can remove the tag.
• Limit religious and political views on your profiles to what you would feel comfortable sharing in a professional environment. 
• Ask friends and relatives to be sensitive regarding comments they make, since these are often visible to a much wider audience than originally intended. 

In time, I think we will see a decentralization of the social networking arena.  I see Facebook as very similar to AOL 10 years ago.  At first, millions of professionals identified AOL with the Internet.  It was easy to use and everyone was signing up.  And this lasted for a few years, but it didn't take long for people to gravitate away from the proprietary confines of AOL toward ISPs and hosting providers that were not managed under the umbrella of some other company's brand.  The same thing will happen in the world of social media, but it will take some time.  And until then, a little caution in what we do and say in the confines of our "personal" online communities may go a long way toward ensuring that no harm is done to our professional image.

How about you?  How do you handle the personal/professional distinction when using social media tools?  If you have a Facebook account, do you use it for both personal and professional use?  Have you found a good way to keep the lines from getting blurred?  Would you feel uncomfortable knowing that anyone who uses Xobni could see your latest status message as well as your most recent image galleries, all 52 images from an old friend's wedding, complete with everyone's comments?