Home Facebook iPhone App Gets Privacy On The Go

Facebook iPhone App Gets Privacy On The Go

When Facebook introduced us to Facebook Places last week, it rolled out a new version of the iPhone app to bring the new feature to many of its mobile users.

While Places took center stage, a number of smaller features and tweaks were added to the latest iPhone app, not the least of which is the ability to play with your privacy settings on a post-by-post basis.

Privacy On The Go

With

more than 100 million Facebook for iPhone users

, using Facebook on to go is a popular feature, but up until now it had one major flaw – anything you said was broadcast using your default privacy settings.

That meant, if you had a status update you didn’t want to share with everyone, you better wait until later. That group of friends you defined specifically so you wouldn’t mix business with pleasure was only good for when you were sitting at a desktop, not out in the world. Now, when you open the status update box in the iPhone app, a small lock icon appears, and tapping it opens up a list of custom friend lists and pre-defined privacy settings, like “Everyone”, “Friends of Friends” and “Friends Only”. The feature follows last month’s addition of mobile privacy settings on Facebook’s mobile website, which means you can now define custom friend groups and post to those groups while you’re out and about.

Tagging and Beyond

According to the

Facebook for iPhone

page, beyond Places, “updates include more granular privacy settings, a snappier inbox with support for threads with multiple users, and improved performance when commenting, liking, or posting stories.”

In addition to these, we’ve also noticed that profiles and pages tagged in status updates are now shown in the Facebook app, making it easier to navigate. Last week, tagging was made even easier (from the website, not mobile) with the addition of an auto-suggest feature to the status update box. Now, navigating to those pages from the iPhone app is possible as well.

The increasing ease with which we can tag people, places and things in Facebook (as well as “like” them, of course) seems to be pushing the site further and further in the direction of making recommendations based on any number of characteristics. We are now not only connected with friends by way of our on-site friendships, but where we check in with them and how much we tag them at different places. And we’re also connected to activities and products, by way of tagging those items in our updates.

We’re waiting to see how all of this tagging affects our overall experience, such as the relevance of what status updates we see in our stream or what ads are displayed based on where we check in.

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