Facebook features 'fan box' tool

The fan box for Coca-Cola. (Credit: Facebook)

Here's something new from Facebook: the "fan box," which is a new tool for celebrities, brands, products, companies, and other entities with Facebook "fan pages" to effectively embed their Facebook presence into their Web sites.

That means that if you go to the Web site of a participating brand, like Coca-Cola or Lance Armstrong's Livestrong nonprofit, you'll see a widget that lets you add that brand as a "fan" on Facebook, which subscribes you to its updates, as well as a feed of updates and an array of profile photos from members who have already proclaimed themselves to be fans.

Facebook is hoping that people will find the "fan box" to be extremely easy to install, so that it's a no-brainer for companies and sites that might not be quite up to speed on technical expertise. This is a big deal as Facebook continues to expand its presence beyond its famed blue-and-white walls, and keeps pushing the message that its 200 million-plus user base is an invaluable resource for marketers--especially interesting since brand promotion is something that MySpace once had a lock on in the social-networking world.

The Facebook Connect log-in product is now installed on over 10,000 sites, and one start-up executive told me Tuesday that it's boosted their user registration numbers so much that he's astonished the company doesn't charge for it. And last month, Facebook launched a tool called the "live stream box," which embeds a stream of the social network's Twitter-like "status updates" pertaining to a given event, much like the one that CNN and MTV used for this week's memorial for the late pop legend Michael Jackson.

"This is a very nice feature of Facebook!"

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Facebook revising privacy settings

Facebook is revising its privacy settings to give the more than 200 million users of the social network the ability to share as much or as little about themselves online as they want.
Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer at the Palo Alto, California-based company, outlined the changes in a post on the Facebook blog.

Kelly said Facebook would now offer a tiered level of privacy options for its users including "all of your friends, your friends and people in your school or work networks, and friends of friends."

There is also an option to publicly share with everyone on the Web in what is being seen as an effort by Facebook to compete with the hot micro-blogging service Twitter.

"To share with more people and contribute to the general conversation going on in the world, you can select 'Everyone,'" Kelly said.

Kelly said, "the power to share is the cornerstone of Facebook."

"Privacy and the tools for tailoring what information is shared with whom are at the heart of trust."
"We're committed to giving people even greater control over the information they share and the audiences with whom they share it," he said.

"At one extreme, we believe people should have the tools to 'broadcast' information across the Web and make it available to everyone.
"At the other extreme, we want to give people the power to limit who should receive any particular piece of information they want to share," he said.

Kelly acknowledged that the privacy settings on Facebook had become "too complicated" and the changes were an effort to "reduce confusion."
Kelly said the revised privacy settings would be offered first to a select group of users over the next few weeks.
"After the testing and feedback phase is complete, we expect to offer final versions of the tool and the new settings to everyone on Facebook," he said.

"A very nice initiative of facebook on this particular feature so that we can limit the information being seen by people in our Profile."

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