"Managing Your Online Presence" update

We ran this course again this term, this time with much more success (i.e. it ran!) and it was a fun class. As well as those who attended, I had a lot of email enquiries about future dates and we are running it next term as part of Employability Week.

Before the session ran, I checked the content and found that Facebook has altered its privacy tools, removing the extremely handy interactive tools that we used to recommend. The URL still works (annoyingly) but if you click on the link to "Preview your Profile" you now get a page not found error... The way to preview your profile is now done from your Timeline. There is a little settings icon which has a "View as" option.

You can choose the Public view or the view of a specific friend - you have lost the ability to view as "Friend of friend" which used to be handy. I can see that this must have become unwieldy as the greater levels of customization for items and lists but it's still a great shame to have lost this option.

"Preview your Public Search Profile" also takes you to a Help page with fresh instructions on the (much more complicated) way to do it. Having followed those instructions, the resulting page has a very plain URL:
https://www.facebook.com/samantha.oakley?p
Perhaps one can just use that URL as a short cut, replaced with your own username? Maybe someone can try it and let me know!

Anyway, all this meant re-vamping our teaching materials and I noticed today that another change to Facebook's privacy settings is being rolled out imminently so that will mean another update. The ever-changing Facebook privacy mess is a pain - it's tough to help our students monitor their online profile on a regular basis with inconsistent tools.