I recently decided to take a different approach to meeting people by not adding them as friends on Facebook until I feel like I’m really friends with them. Sounds simple, right?

It was hard to resist the urge of finding out more about a person when their lives are not served to you on a silver platter. You find yourself googling them, checking if they are on twitter and what not, and then just surrendering to just giving them a call and going out for a coffee or beer.

From then on, something happens. You actually start to make a real connection that is not overpowered by assumptions of who that person is based on their shared media. You are actually getting to know them. Sharing stories and experiences with each other, in your own words and expressions, not a slideshow of pictures with no narrative, or a series of status updates that have no context.

The only drawback is not being able to share things online with those non-network friends. Inviting them to events reverts back to email, text messages and phone calls. Sharing interesting or funny video clips needs you to enter their email address, etc. All the things that were time consuming about the web that social media made quick and easy, are gone.

I’m going to stick with it, but I do know that at some point, i’m going to have to bring them in to the fold,. But by holding back, at least I know that I can really call them a friend.

When do you add a friend on Facebook? Do you wait a while before you add them, or do you do it immediately?

Engagement

Creating an environment that attracts users and keeps them is one hell of a task, and continuously engaging your users is not small feat. You have to create a culture of sharing, collaboration, and reciprocation that makes the user want to participate in what you developed, and pull in others in to the fun.

Social engagement needs to involve actions that builds on a users social connections, and something that will appeal to a circle of friends. The hook is the quick and easy action that is viral and has high visibility to social graph. The line is the engaging actions that bring in your social connections and continues to connect them. And the sinker is community that brings more people together one way or another.

Communicate

Communication, communication, communication is to social media what location, location, location is to business. Communication with your users is one of the most important aspects of social media. What do I mean by communication? Meaningful dialog with your users through blog post commentary, forums and discussion boards, Twitter and support channels.

Communication has to be a two way street, where you can personally talk to your users. Now you might be tempted to talk about your product, how people use it, and give them tips and tricks on how to utilize it better. Thats a great start, but the key is to find out what your users want to talk about and not what you want to talk about. This is where you have to get more personal with your users and learn from them. And here is the segway to the next point …

Learn

Learning from your users is the only way to iteratively develop and enhance your product and user experience. Users can be very vocal about what they want and what they like, but you need to build a dialog of trust that brings out the constructive criticism to you. It’s important to be able to track feedback, themes in constructive criticism and be able to prioritize and respond appropriately.

What you will learn is that they way your application is used, can be very different from what you intended it to be. Learning and understanding how your users are thinking differently about what you’ve built will get you farther in finding news was to engage than any other way.

How do you continually engage with your users, and what tools do you utilize to learn form your users?

Well first off, it all depends on what the purpose of the application is, and who is the intended audience. You might be developing a game that is based on a user’s friends for engagement, or you just need to delegate the authentication system to ease registration. There are many reasons to develop within, or break out of the box, so lets look at the pros and cons, and some of the reasons you might do it either way.

Within Facebook: iFrame/FBML

Facebook has over 300 million users. It is a great source of users, who visit more than once a day and spend good amount of their internet surfing time on the social network. Most applications built within Facebook look to take a slice of that time, by further enhancing the social experience. Multiplayer games, sharing and collaborative applications are great examples.These applications tend to be short attention span applications, with very simple interfaces and involve quick actions a user can do in between browsing their friend shared lives.

Facebook also gives you direct access to its user base, through many of the hooks it has created in its platform. This is great for viral growth through notifications, status updates, news feed posts and invitations. Its very easy to get the word out to the rest of your users friends from within.

When it comes to FBML/FBJS (Facebook’s own markup language and javascript) or developing in an iFrame, I definitely prefer iFrames. Facebooks development language, though it makes for more of an immersive user experience, is slow and very limited. iFrames give you the flexibility to use any javascript framework you desire, and the speed of your code optimized on your server.

Breaking outside the box: Using Facebook Connect

Sometimes, the Facebook user base isn’t what your looking for. If you have  a very feature rich application, then it may be best to be a standalone application. Your users will be away from the distractions of Facebook notifications, email and chat, and can take the time to soak in your app. With Facebook Connect, you can allow your users to register easily with their Facebook credentials, and import all the contacts and information, but without the Facebook chrome and distractions.

Other than Facebook connect, there are many API based social networks and authentications systems available these days, each with its own niche features and following. Sometimes you want to be able to appeal to the broadest set of users, by making your social application integrated to more than one. Facebook for its social connections, Twitter for its status updates, LinkedIn for its professional contacts, and maybe Four Square for location based services. In this case, it would be best if your social application was outside of the eco-system and free to explore all avenues it needs.

Personal experience

In my personal experience, I tend to see Facebook as a place to develop small , fun and easy to user, viral applications that will grow like wild fire, but will have a short life span. When I set out to try and build a feature rich application, with unique niche features that need many integration points to other web API services, I try and build outside of Facebook but still leveraging it with Facebook Connect. Giving my users the flexibility with multiple authentications systems, and multiple social sharing avenues.

How do you set out to develop your next social based web application? Any suggestions on how to leverage the millions of users on all the social networks with API’s?

2009 has been plagued by security and privacy concerns, from Facebook’s Terms of Use scandal and its recent privacy settings changes, to applications built on the Facebook platform that abused user information, and exposed email, username’s and password a la RockYou. Social API’s have allowed for amazing things in the past couple of years, but has also seen some wide spread abuse of what can done with them. Social media advertising companies using your demographic information and photos to target your friends for more clicks has been rampant and Facebook has taken action. There have also been many applications that done worse. As a developer on Facebook, I am sometimes surprised at what can be done with the information available to me, when user’s click on the accept button and hand me their life on a silver platter.

User’s have been too free with their information which got them in hot water every so often. Accepting all those apps is fun, and one hell of a time waster when you need one, but you never know who the developers are, and what are they doing with your information. Even though application invites are a thing of the past, and almost no one accepts them anymore, developers have been crafty to get users to add their latest fun quiz or personality test.

The worst part is that users are too free with their information between themselves, and the public. They try setting their privacy and closing their profiles, but even if users did heighten their privacy settings to their most paranoidlevels, it seems like it still doesn’t take much to expose their details. A study by the security company Sophos, revealed that users accepted friend invites on Facebook from people they didn’t know all too often. And all too often its being taken advantage of by not just advertisers and developers.

Companies are exploiting people’s openness with their information for their own purposes. The case of the Quebec woman suffering from depression who got her health insurance payments stopped because she posted photos of herself on the beach and in a party. Her doctors recommended she take some time off and try to have a good time to help her depression. Her insurance company was investigating her, and managed to get within a few degrees of separation in her social graph, to see what she’s been up to,

How do I protect my privacy?

So what now? What do we do? Well for one, be a little more careful with our information. Here are some tips:

• Don’t accept random friend requests from people you don’t know, or dont have an association with you. Check their mutual friends list.
• Sensitive information can be used for identity theft. Set your security settings to not display your email address, date of birth, home town and phone numbers publicly.
• Hide information from friends of friends, because you never know who your friends are friends with!
• Created lists that have different privacy levels. There is some information, photos, videos of yourself you want to show your friends, but not your co-workers or boss. Or just don’t post them on social media networks at all.

Sophos has a great video that explains what Facebook’s new privacy settings mean, and how to go about insuring your saftey.

If thats all not enough, and all this has you freaked out, well you can try and remove yourself completely from social networks using a service called Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The site lets you purge all your connections, friendships as well as photos, videos and identity from Facebook, Myspace, Twitter  and Linkedin. Check out the video for more details.

Note: Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has recently been blocked by Facebook and slapped it with a Cease and Desist letter,

“kindly asking us to stop our service and remove all Facebook profile pictures we collected for the memorial pages and anything else which could be associated with Facebook from our website”

At the end of the day, it wise to know that privacy is something that one needs to take on actively, and be aware of its implications, not just you, but for everyone around you. Lots of research has been conducted recently on the subject privacy and its impact on our behaviours, and its implications on people around us.

What do you think of the matter? How do you protect your privacy on social networks and online communities?