Paul and I have a running joke when we talk about the Windows Live Network – we refer to it as the biggest social network that nobody has heard of. As much as this might be the case it may prove to be beneficial to the long term success of the network – if it ever finds that magic tipping point that brings it out of obscurity.
One of the biggest failings of the majority of social networks that have gone big is that they always screw it up when comes to user privacy and how they can control who sees or reads what. Facebook is constantly pushing the envelope trying to get people to believe that they want to share absolutely everything with everyone – including the advertisers.
Well it looks like the team behind the privacy settings on the Windows Live Network have been paying attention to all this as they have added some of the best, and drop dead simple to use, privacy settings for users to use on their accounts.
I had been following a lot of the discussion that was going on regarding the privacy settings in Windows Live Network and I knew it was important to the team as a whole but it wasn’t until a post by team member Omar Shahine that I realized just how important it was.
I would really recommend reading his whole post because to be truthful this is how it should be done on social networks but to give you an idea of the depth and ease of controlling these settings here are some of the graphics from his post.
Privacy Selector
This apparently is the first of the privacy options you will have and is intended to provide you with a baseline of settings to start from.
Close friends vs. aquaintances
One of the big problems with services like Facebook is that they don’t understand that we have varying degrees of friends – some are close friends while others are really just acquaintances – and that they need to be treated differently even on social media networks. It seems that WLN will let you decide to what degree each person can see stuff in your account.
Managing what your friends can see
Granularity is obviously a key principal with the Windows Live Network team as it seem that you will be able to fine tune what each of your friends can see of your stuff and of your activity
Setting your privacy defaults
One of the things people have always complained about when it came to Facebook privacy setting was that they were too complex and hard to follow. Apparently the WLN took this to heart and had a look at their own setup and made some serious changes in order to simplify the process for the user. But is is also an extension – and builds on – the previous privacy selector.
Even further granularity of privacy settings
Not satisfied with those options the team have enabled even more advanced ways to control your privacy settings.
As you can see the Windows Live Network have done their best to make the privacy tools simple and easy to use and yet provide you with a sense of control over who can see what is happening in your activity streams.
But like I said above make sure to drop by and real all of Omar’s post for all the details of the team’s work..
Related posts:
Microsoft wrote the book on granularity...never thought there would come a day when I'd welcome that. I haven't been able to parse down to the links in this post in detail yet so I might be missing something obvious: I hope it's possible to create groups (or lists) and then have the option to assign privacy settings per individual (which I know is considered inefficient) or by group. That would be excellent.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeI would strongly suggest reading Omar's original post but from what I was able to gather I believe you can create groups - or at least fine tune the settings on each individual within specific groups that would already have a set of user defined settings applied to it. In effect if I understand this properly it is much like a trickle down set of setting. from the over all base - to groups - to individuals within each group.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeMicrosoft wrote the book on granularity...never thought there would come a day when I'd welcome that. I haven't been able to parse down to the links in this post in detail yet so I might be missing something obvious: I hope it's possible to create groups (or lists) and then have the option to assign privacy settings per individual (which I know is considered inefficient) or by group. That would be excellent.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeI would strongly suggest reading Omar's original post but from what I was able to gather I believe you can create groups - or at least fine tune the settings on each individual within specific groups that would already have a set of user defined settings applied to it. In effect if I understand this properly it is much like a trickle down set of setting. from the over all base - to groups - to individuals within each group.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeMicrosoft wrote the book on granularity...never thought there would come a day when I'd welcome that.
I haven't been able to parse down to the links in this post in detail yet so I might be missing something obvious: I hope it's possible to create groups (or lists) and then have the option to assign privacy settings per individual (which I know is considered inefficient) or by group. That would be excellent.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeI would strongly suggest reading Omar's original post but from what I was able to gather I believe you can create groups - or at least fine tune the settings on each individual within specific groups that would already have a set of user defined settings applied to it. In effect if I understand this properly it is much like a trickle down set of setting. from the over all base - to groups - to individuals within each group.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeMicrosoft wrote the book on granularity...never thought there would come a day when I'd welcome that.
I haven't been able to parse down to the links in this post in detail yet so I might be missing something obvious: I hope it's possible to create groups (or lists) and then have the option to assign privacy settings per individual (which I know is considered inefficient) or by group. That would be excellent.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeI would strongly suggest reading Omar's original post but from what I was able to gather I believe you can create groups - or at least fine tune the settings on each individual within specific groups that would already have a set of user defined settings applied to it. In effect if I understand this properly it is much like a trickle down set of setting. from the over all base - to groups - to individuals within each group.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like