What the heck is Instant Personalization!?!!?!?
Thursday, April 29th, 2010What the heck are Instant Personalization and Social Plugins? Last week, Facebook released two new features and they have decided that everyone is automatically “opted in”, meaning you have to turn them off. Consequently, you could be sharing some of your Facebook data without knowing it. Interestingly enough, even Congress might be getting in the act.
So what are instant personalization and social plugins? Instant personalization is the sharing of your public Facebook data with other websites. At the current time, there are 3 partners who are linked with Facebook…..Pandora, Yelp and Docs.com. If you are logged in to Facebook, and visit these sites, you will see a blue bar across the top that will say…”Hi Larry (or your name). XYZ company is using Facebook to personalize your experience. “ At this point, you can click “No thanks”. If you don’t then the site will use your public Facebook data to tailor the site’s functionality to you. This information includes you name, profile picture, gender and connections. If you want to stop instant personalization, then login to Facebook, go to Privacy Settings, then Applications and then uncheck the Allow box for Instant Personalization. At this point you will get an “Are you sure” box with a message……the important sentence in this notification is…..”Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application.” Now that is fascinating. To stop this, you then need to block the Docs, Yelp and Pandora applications.
The second feature, called Social plugins, add Facebook functions to websites, such as the “Like” button. If you click the “Like” button, then all of your friends will see that you liked the story when they see the posting on your wall. To avoid this feature, simply don’t click on the button or log out of Facebook first.
As I said before, the social media concept is fantastic and I believe has yet to come close to maturity. There are however, many related issues. While I don’t agree on the default of “opt in”, I really like the concept of using data to create a better online experience. This is clearly the future. Marketers have been using this concept for years with cookies and IP traces. So the concept isn’t new, but this degree of sophistication is.
Another potential issue for any company is the gathering and sharing of personal information and this issue just got a little more complex. The rules and regulations on data privacy are still evolving and data breaches still occur, so you need to be careful.
Data on Facebook is personal and most people that I speak with are not aware of the various security settings within their Facebook page…..or what to do if something embarrassing to them happens on their site with all of their friends watching……right Beth? LOL!
Facebook is great, and I love it. The bottom line…..go to Facebook right now and log on. Go to the privacy settings and make sure they are setup to fit your views on sharing information. For all you parents, the next step is to make sure your kid’s pages are secure as well.





