Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a novel told in the format of a series of journal entries and letters, all with times and dates attributed to them. This type of work is called an epistolary novel. In a brilliant move, blogger Whitney Sorrow (quite an appropriate surname for this project, no?) has set up a blog to publish each journal entry, letter and so on that makes up the story of Dracula on the dates listed on those letters. One, this lets you follow along as part of the story and will give you an unprecedented sense of the time interval over which the story unfolds. Two, you get to read a classic novel in small, manageable snippets over a period of time. *Brilliant* work.

Check out the Dracula Feed and subscribe to follow along with the story. You may need to install a garlic or stake widget to your blog for safety reasons after visiting this site.

There are other journals and other “Real-Time Literary Blog Projects” underway, some live now, listed on the Dracula Feed that look well worth checking out. Henry David Thoreau’s Journal for example.

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, dracula, epistolary

Anyone else see this one coming?  I’m preparing a post on some of the valuable elements of Twitter, but in the meantime, rumors are gaining credence that Google is in the process of acquiring Twitter.  As you may know, Facebook made an offer of $500 million, which was turned down a few months ago.  Facebook is now mounting an effort to compete with the micro-blogging platform.

Twitter just celebrated its 3rd birthday a couple weeks ago and it’s already one of the fastest growing websites ever.  The move for Google to acquire Twitter is an obvious one from a logistical standpoint.  Google and Microsoft are strong competitors.  Microsoft acquired Facebook not too long ago, and Facebook is currently targetting their efforts in competition with Twitter for micro-blogging, “status updating” dominance.  With Google wanting to stay ahead of the game with Microsoft, and currently having no micro-blogging platform, it’s an obvious choice that Google should want to buy Twitter at any price.

If you’re weighing the odds of whether Twitter would come to an agreement with Google — consider this.  Twitter is currently owned by Biz Stone and Evan Williams.  These are the same guys that created Blogger around 5 years ago.  As you know, Blogger/Blogspot was purchased by Google.  So these guys are on familiar ground.

Why would Google want Twitter at any cost?  Market Research.  To go into detail would take too much room here, so look for another post regarding that this afternoon!

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Search Engines, Social Media, Twitter

Adjusting Privacy Settings For Your Friends Lists

Once you have your lists, you may want to configure a few privacy settings for those lists. For example, let’s assume you create a list of business contacts. You can then adjust the privacy settings on this list so that none of your business contacts can see the more personal areas of your Facebook profile. You can keep some of your friends at a more distant professional level, while keeping your personal friends in the know.  Here’s how:

Let’s do this by example. You can then do the same thing for the other settings in the same area. Okay, so let’s say that you want to create a list of people and call it “Business Contacts”. Let’s also say that you only know them professionally, and you don’t want them to see or interact with your personal friends. Maybe you just want to be sure nobody in your professional life starts messaging people in your personal life. Here’s how you would block your “Business Contacts” list from seeing your personal friends.

First, in the upper right corner, go to Settings and click Privacy Settings.

That will take you to the privacy page. It’s worthwhile looking through all of these, but for our example, click Profile.

This will let you set privacy options for the major elements of your individual profile. You can adjust the privacy settings of each element of your profile, such as “Wall Posts” and “Friends”, so that only certain groups can see it. Continuing our example, scroll down to Friends. Clicking the [?] next to it opens up a detail box to show you what this will adjust.

If you clicked the [?], click Okay to close this note. Then click “My Networks and Friends” to see the rest of the options. These are all very general settings for who is allowed to see your friends. We don’t want to block everyone, only certain groups. So, click Customize.

This will open up an area allowing you to make specific changes.

If you want to manually set it so that everyone can see your friends, click “Everyone on Facebook”. If you want the rest of your friends to only be visible to Friends or even Friends and their Friends, click one of those radio buttons. You can likewise set it so that only certain networks can see your friends. Such as people that went to the same college as you or people that live in the same city. What we’re interested in is this last option. You’ll notice in the above that I’ve selected “Only Friends” are allowed to see my profile. Then it lets me enter an exception. I can enter individual friends’ names, or the name of one or more of my Friends Lists.

So, to prevent Business Contacts from seeing and interacting with the rest of my friends? I chose “Only Friends” are allowed to see who the rest of my friends are as a general privacy choice. In the area beneath, “Except These People”, I would then type the Friends List, Business Contacts. If you have more than one Friends List that you’d like to block, enter the name of another Friends List after that, separating them with a comma between each entry.

You can then do the same for the other privacy settings in your profile. Don’t want your Business Contacts to be able to post to your wall, for any and all to see? No problem, block them. Perhaps a better option: don’t want your Business Contacts to be able to see your wall where your friends may make very personal comments? Adjust your Wall Posts settings the same way we did above.

Conclusion

Thank you for following along with these tutorials. I hope that for many of you, this was an interesting find and a creative way to organize your Facebook to meet your personal and professional needs. I welcome any feedback you may have on these tutorials.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Friends Lists, Optimization, Privacy, Social Media, Social Networking, Tutorial, Web 2.0

Friends lists are a little more obvious and easy to find in the new Facebook design than they were in the old one.  Clearly, it’s something Facebook wants to emphasize.  So, why do you need to use lists?  How will they help you?

It’s easiest to demonstrate this by example.  Among my Facebook friends, I have fellow marketers, fellow science enthusiasts, classmates, people I went to high school with, family members and people with whom I’ve entered a joint venture or two.  About a year ago, I started categorizing all my Facebook friends into lists.  If the same person fit multiple categories, Facebook would let me put them in as many categories as I like.  If a family member was also a classmate, I could put them in both my Family and Classmates lists.

What makes this so great?

Well, before, it made it really easy to send messages to multiple people.  If I wanted to invite all my family members to a get-together, I could just type the name of that list as the person I’m sending the message to, and everyone in that list gets the message.

What else makes Facebook lists so important?  Two words:  Privacy Settings.

Facebook allows you to customize your privacy settings for each list of friends.  Say you have a big generic list of friends called “Business Contacts” and another list called “Personal Contacts”.  You can make it so that your business contacts don’t see certain elements of your profile, such as your wall, status updates or even your other friends on Facebook.

With the new Facebook homepage, there’s a third reason why Facebook Friends Lists are huge:  Now you can sort your newsfeed by Friends lists and group posts and whatnot.  If you’re just interested in seeing updates from your Classmates at the moment, then you can click the “Classmates” list, available to the left of your newsfeed, and it will only show you updates from people in that list.  To see updates from everyone again, just click “News Feed”.   So, without further ado…

How To Create Facebook Friends Lists

First, login to Facebook, obviously.  Then, click Friends.

This will show you all your friends.  From here, in the left panel, click the option to “Make a Friends List”.

Facebook is now helpful enough to guide you through the rest of the process.  The first step is to name the list to be.  You can change the name later if you like.  To do that, you’ll need to click “Friends”, then move the mouse cursor over one of the lists in the left panel, which will bring up an “edit” option.  Click “edit” and you can change the name of the list.

Then, you just start adding your friends by typing their names or clicking “Select Multiple Friends”.

At this point, you’re finished creating your list.  From here, you can also send a message to a list, or even delete the list if you’ve changed your mind.  Those options are just below the middle panel that contains all the friends in your list.  When you delete a list, it does not delete the friends you put in that list.  It only deletes the list itself, not the actual friends in the list.  The option appears as follows:

That sums up establishing a list.  Now, what about privacy settings?  Look for a post with details on optimizing your Facebook profile for both your personal and professional contacts tomorrow morning.  Thanks for taking the time to read thus far!  Any feedback on whether or not this post has been helpful to you is welcome.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Friends Lists, Optimization, Privacy, Social Media, Social Networking, Tutorial, Web 2.0