In honor of the Christmas season, I’m pulling out an oldie but a goodie out of the archives.  The following is a 100% true story I wrote for my personal web site back in 1997 before the days of blogs.  Enjoy.

The worst job I ever had was a temp job working the customer counter at UPS during the holiday season. I learned so much of the psychology of Christmas; it was both fascinating and disturbing.

As I expected, I dealt with hundreds of hurried shoppers who were breathless from trying to make those last purchases in time to get there before Santa, but as the days wore on, the true ugliness of human nature was revealed in to me in a way I would just as soon forget. Every other customer was a spouse (usually the husband) sending presents to ungrateful distant relatives that his spouse (usually the wife) had packed. What exactly was in those huge boxes was unbeknownst to him. He was just doing his (easier) part of Christmas duty and he just wanted to shell out some money and get rid of the damn things. But ah, it is not so easy! First we must know what is *in* these mammoth boxes so that we can discern whether they are a hazard to UPS employees. If they contain glass of any kind, which most Christmas presents do, they must be checked to make sure they are "double-boxed" which will make them more likely to arrive in one piece. Yes, this means opening the boxes. Yes, this means unwrapping the presents. Is that a picture frame? A Christmas ornament? A jar of mint marmalade? You don't know? Well I'm afraid we have to unwrap it. Yes, you can call your wife.

So there was always one man in the service area calling his wife. There was also always one wife having a nervous breakdown about us having to ruin her intricate gift wrapping and wasting her valuable time. "What do you mean you have to tear this open? I just want to get rid of this stuff! Take it! What do I care if it breaks? Just take it! Here I'll break it for you! (Stomp Stomp Stomp!)"

There were more than a few women who resorted to stomping on their packages for us to demonstrate their willingness to send broken presents. Hell, what did they care- it's the thought that counts, right? And wouldn't it serve those ungrateful nieces and nephews right to get mangled booty. Wretches. This in turn made the men on the phone change their minds about calling their wives. “Oh, I just remembered what was in those packages- it's books! Yeah, right. Books and clothes!” That became the savior phrase of the season. I whispered it to the temporarily bewildered customers as they waited in the serpentine lines. Books and clothes. Books and clothes. A seasonal mantra evoking safety and peace.

May your holidays be full of books and clothes.

Everyone is freaking out about snow today (schools are closed and work is a ghost town and not a flake has fallen – go figure) and it reminds me of that intense winter two years ago when the power went out and the snow fell like cottage cheese:

More crazy snow pics

Just heard Brad say, “The wind’s blowing outside – you’d better go home.”

I wrote up a tutorial on how to keep things private on Windows Live and talked about setting up categories for your friends.  I did this in Facebook too (they are called “Friend Lists” there) and thought I’d share it here as well since so many people use it.  Using categories is an extremely freeing way to use social networks because it allows you to easily share different kinds of information and photos with only the people you want.  There's a little bit of overhead in setting this system up, but once you have the hang of it you will find yourself using social networks even more and feeling much more secure about it. 

Why use categories?

There are several ways to set up your friend categories.  I set mine up using four levels:  Very close friends (they get to see the most personal pictures), friends (they see most pictures), professional friends (they don't see many pictures), and strangers (they don't even see my status updates).  I know some people only make one distinction: friends and acquaintances.  Some people make three distinctions:  personal friends, professional friends, old acquaintances.  It might be easier to use terms like "full, moderate and limited access” instead of trying to describe the people in the group (“friends, acquaintances”).  You should think about your content and what you might want to share to what people and from that you can figure out what categories you will want to create for your friends.

Putting your friends in Friend Lists

Putting all my friends in category lists was a lot more tedious on Facebook than on Windows Live because it took several clicks for each person instead of being able to add multiple people at a time using checkboxes (UPDATE 2/2/09 – they now have multi-select).  Also, when you confirm a friend on Facebook (they added you), you have to add them to your friend lists before you confirm them – if you forget you have to go into “Friends” and add them from there.  If you add them from their profile page it lets you add them to a list right in the popup:

To categorize your friends, first you go to Friends in the top nav and sort by “Recently Added”:

Then you have to expand a friend’s section by clicking the box icon in the top right of their module so you get the little arrow next to “View Friends”:

When you click the arrow the lists appear:

Then I put each person in two lists: a category and a permission level (I made up these terms to distinguish between the different kinds of friend lists I set up).  These things are independent, at least for me they are!  A category is where I know them from which is useful for recommending friends to other people or inviting friends to an event.  For example, I recommended other former classmates from Vassar for my friend Jean: 

(Yes, “Filter by network” would work the same way but not everyone joins the networks).

You also may have noticed I have four friend lists that start with “PERM” – I made those up so I could use them as permissions levels.  Permissions levels are how I decide who sees what.  Who can see my phone number, my status updates, that incriminating photo album of the company Christmas party, etc.  I made mine all start with "PERM" which stands for Permissions so they would all be grouped together alphabetically.  I added a number "1" - "4" so I could just type the number in entry boxes and the right list would pop up without me having to remember exactly what I named the different levels.  For example, if I friended Kayte and saw "Add to a friend list" I would type in "1" because I want to put her in the "Close friends" category but may not remember I named it "Close friends" and not "Best friends".

So now you can see how these two things (category and permission level) can be independent – I may have personal or more professional relationships with coworkers or former classmates, etc.  Maybe I want my old college buddy to see my wacky photos and she’d get on my “Close friend” list but maybe I didn’t know another classmate very well so he’d get on my “stranger” list even though both would be on my “Vassar” list.  It's a "matrix" organization for you geeks out there.

So once you have all your people on your friend lists you can go and set up your privacy settings.

Setting up your privacy settings

To set permissions for your profile information, go to Settings in the top nav and pick “Privacy settings”

Then go to “Profile”

Now start checking it out:

If you don't know what bits of information are in each of the buckets like "Personal Info", just click on the question mark on the right. 

I know it's annoying that you can't set up permissions on every individual bit if information, let alone why Facebook considers Relationship Status "Basic info" and not "Personal info".  That's just all part of the challenge of designing web applications - there are always trade offs between simplicity and flexibility.

You can then “Edit Custom Settings” on each bucket of information:

Very cool.  So zip through and set all the settings!  And don’t miss that tab next to “Basic” that says “Contact information” – you need to permission all that stuff too so your ex girlfriend doesn’t start drunk dialing your mobile phone.

I love how Facebook uses “Except these people” but the drawback of using "Except" or subtractive permissions is that if you add someone as a friend and forget to set their permission level they get access to stuff by default.  So for example if I add Dan Quayle to my friends but forget to add him to the “PERM 4 – stranger” list he can see my Personal Info because I've permissioned it to my Friends except for levels 3 and 4.  If I'd set up my Personal Info to be permissioned to my friends but only levels 1 and 2 he wouldn't see it.  So I may go back and change the way I've set mine up (see above) or I have to remember to immediately put people in lists when I add them.

I don’t want people to know I’m calling them “strangers”

Now you may be wondering, “But what if my new friend sees that I just added him to my “Stranger” list!  That’s not very nice even if she did steal my boyfriend in 9th grade!”

Rest assured that your friends can’t see any of your friend lists.  The only way they could figure out what list you put them on is if they hear about some content you put on Facebook that they don’t have access to – maybe from a friend in an email (“Aren’t those Christmas Party pics that Ann posted incriminating?”) – and they go to look for it and can’t find it.  Or maybe they are looking over the shoulder of a mutual friend of yours and they see that your friend’s experience of your Facebook profile is different from theirs.  Or maybe you talk incessantly in your face to face time about how much you change your status message yet they recall that they’ve never seen one from you. 

These scenarios are outliers or “edge cases” – they are unlikely to happen in real life so you shouldn’t worry too much about them.  Even if they did happen, that person that doesn’t have access to your incriminating party photos because you consider them a stranger is unlikely to know you well enough to call you out on it.  They are more likely to be aware that you have a distant relationship and would understand why they don’t see everything you share online.

Still worried what all this will look like?  Check this out:

See how a friend sees your profile

Another cool feature Facebook has is that you can see how specific people will see your profile using this hard to notice box “See how a friend sees your profile:”

It puts a box at the top of your profile:

Now you can see what different friends see when they look at your profile.

But wait – some of my “stranger” friends can still see a bunch of stuff that I don’t want them to see

Not every bit of information is able to be permissioned, at least not from the profile section.  Most (if not all – I still can’t find “Pages” though) of these exceptions are applications like Groups and Events.  To change those permissions, go to the main Privacy page and click “Application Settings” and “Show:” all of the applications you have “Added to your profile”.  Click “Edit settings” and then the “Profile” tab to lock them down from there.

If you are feeling like you want to lock down everything and truly not let your “stranger” friends see anything at all, you might consider locking down your profile altogether, which is the first setting on the profile privacy page.

You might ask, “Then why friend these people in the first place when they aren’t going to see anything on my profile?”  Well, at least they’ll be in your friend list and they won’t see that you haven’t confirmed them yet:

Don’t you hate it when you get a friend request from someone you really didn’t know well and you ignore it and then they invite you again?  Spare yourself the guilt and embarrassment – just accept them and put them on a “stranger” list.

Photos

OK, now the part that everyone really cares about!

To set photo album privacy click “Album Privacy”.  There's a link to it where you set up permissions for Photos tagged of you ( "Edit photo album privacy settings") or there's a link to it in your photo album list in the Photos section ("Album Privacy"):

And then you can set permissions for each album:

Send me your feedback

Whew!  That's a lot to keep you busy!  Let me know what you think about this or about Windows Live privacy settings.  How do you wish this stuff worked?

I know the biggest want for most people that I talk to is the ability to permission specific status messages.  If I want to post “I’m going postal!” and only have my close friends see it and not my boss, it’s pretty much impossible if he is permissioned to see my status messages in general.  I can’t imagine how this UI would work though so perhaps it’s a pipe dream, or in the pipeline ;)

I spent a good portion of the last year working on Permissions and Privacy on Windows Live.  We made a lot of progress but setting this up can be hard to figure out if you don't have a good strategy.  Here’s a tutorial that will help you see how you can use permissions settings on Windows Live so you can relax a little more about sharing your personal information online.

Windows Live

Personal information

• Click “Profile” in the top nav
• Click “Details” in the left nav
• Every chunk of information says who you are sharing it with.  You can change this permissions setting by clicking on it (in this case “Everyone (public)”)

• You can let everyone see it, only people in your network see it (that’s people in your Hotmail address book, on your Profile, and in IM), or your extended network (that’s friends of friends)

• You can also make your own categories of people and permission it to them. 

This is super helpful if you want to set up “close friends” vs. “strangers” distinctions for sharing bits of information and content.  When you add new people you can add them to a category and voila – they have permission to see only the things you want them to see!

You can go back and categorize all your people easily using the category dropdown on the People page:

• You can also enter individual people

Photos (Files and other things work the same way)

• When you create a new album you have an opportunity to set the permissions

• You can limit it to your network so only your friends will see it

• Or you can get the more detailed options shown above if you click “Select people”

• You can also go back and change the permissions settings for old photo albums by clicking the “Shared with:” link at the bottom

Facebook works in much the same way – I’ll post a tutorial on that soon.

Tons of details on the Space Craft: http://thespacecraft.spaces.live.com/

And lookee:

Pretty!    Now go check out yours!  http://profile.live.com and see what your peeps are up to at http://home.live.com

No peeps yet?  Import your contacts from Hotmail, Facebook or Linked In and get goin! http://profile.live.com/connect/ (this is one of the features I worked on btw!)

I know – you are thinking, “Why join yet another social network?” Well, first of all, if you use Windows Live Messenger or Hotmail you are already a member!  And I love the little ways all of the parts of Windows Live integrate.  For example, here’s the “What’s New” feed right at the bottom of the Messenger window:

Here’s another: Check out the the people in my network.  Their online status is reflected in the color of their glass frame.  That’s cool.

And I just updated my status message on the site and it updated in Messenger automatically!

These little things add up to an unbeatable experience and we’ll be finding more ways to integrate and leverage the huge social network that already exists in Windows Live.  Come along for the ride!