Facebook Opens Up Publisher - Now Go Tell Everyone
Facebook users will soon gain the ability to publish content so that everyone on the web can view it. This will lead a big change for Facebook users, many of whom have been limited to sharing content only with others on Facebook.
The social network has invited its beta testers to experiment with a new version of the site’s Publisher feature, the web-based tool Facebookers use to post status updates, photos and videos to their profiles.
This latest development, announced Wednesday, is only available to beta testers who have made their Facebook profiles visible publicly to everyone, not just Facebook users. The features will be made available soon to other users, the company says. This development also falls in line with Facebook’s support for Activity Streams, the emerging standard for organizing and adding structure to these streams of updates, photos, videos and comments.
The new Publisher contains some added privacy controls, enabling uesrs to push out posts to just their Facebook friends or everyone, on or off Facebook.
Interestingly, the default setting is “Everyone” — showing Facebook is offering some gentle encouragement to its users to share their posts with the whole internet.
Wired.com writer Ryan Singel points out the significance of this on Epicenter:
Clearly the intent is to convince users to publish to the world, since the default is set to “Everyone” — which means the entire internet — with the choice to narrow to “Friends,” “Friends of Friends,” “networks,” or select users when more privacy is wanted. It’s plainly an attempt to gather some of the energy and publicness of Twitter for Facebook, which has largely shied away from exposing its members’ activities outside its online walls.
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Facebook also tipped its hat to Twitter three months ago with changes that added focus to real-time status updates and a change to the status question, which became: “What’s on your mind?” Twitter’s pre-existing equivalent is “What are you doing?”
We here at Webmonkey (and Epicenter) have been arguing for some time that Facebook should open up its network to allow the publishing of content outside its walls. The company has always balked at such a strategy, saying such a move would violate the trust of its users who have come to expect the strictest of privacy controls.
However, it seems Facebook may have found a way to open up the publishing ability while keeping those much-valued privacy controls intact.
Photo: Flickr/Andrew Feinberg
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