Facebook adds cliques: yay!

I've been wanting for a long time to be able to share information in Facebook in a very granular way.  They have finally enabled it, but the settings are not as centralized as one might wish.

Some settings are under the master Privacy control panel

http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php

whereas others are more easily found on the individual pages for particular capabilities.  For example, photo privacy, to set who can view which albums, is at

http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=photos

And very confusingly, which there are some application settings on the main privacy page

http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=platform

The very granular "let some friends/friends lists see an application in my profile, but not others" is in the Applications edit screen, under Edit Settings for each application.  Also, unfortunately, when you add a new application I didn't see any way to set the privacy before it is added to your profile, only after it is added.  So there is a brief window when it is outside of privacy control, using the default settings.

http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php

You can set access for friends either per individual, or per friend list, and you can add multiple friends lists to the allowed group ("allow only - default deny").  You can also exclude, or as I prefer to think of it, outcast specific friends lists ("allow all but - default allow").  It's like firewall rules for friends.

You can also if you want, allow friends of friends, and control access by network (networks are things like the Ottawa network, the Your Company Name Here network etc.)

This means that I can finally start adding some apps like Dopplr, which provides detailed travel info I might not necessarily want to share with the world.

In case you're wondering, yes this is a real rule in my account, it says "allow all friends to see my Dopplr travel status, except those in friends list 'random people'". [UPDATE: err to clarify, 'random people' is a friends list that contains people that I don't know very well.]

See Facebook Blog - More Privacy Options for more info.

UPDATE: As with setting complex firewall rules, getting the rules set up for all applications is quite time consuming.  Things that would help:

1. "Rule sets" - All creation of rules that can be applied to all applications, or to a subset of apps, and anywhere that privacy rules are used, e.g. "everyone in the lists 'work' and 'work friends' can see this, no one else".
2. Testing - there is no way to test the rules that I can see - it would be very helpful to have a "see this profile as it appears to user X" option.

Previously:
January 18, 2008  social networlds colliding
November 08, 2007  posting TypePad entries to Facebook
August 14, 2007  FaceBook pulls open scientists into the dark web