Interestingly, the bug was found by a Google software engineer trying out Facebook’s new Social Graph API, and he found that there’s no way to stop this from happening, except by not attending. While there are Facebook privacy settings you can control, this is the latest problem users face and have to rely on the company to fix. You’d think that after the long list of such privacy and security breaches by Facebook that they’d test their code more rigorously before introducing it onto the live website.

If you do care about your privacy, read up on whatever you can about the recent Facebook changes and security settings in general. Gina Trapani gets you started over at Fast Company.

A little bit of contemplation made me realize that there are actually several different types of Facebook friends. Here are a few of the types I have:

1. Friends and acquaintances from real life.
2. People I’ve worked with online or by phone.
3. People I’ve communicated with by phone or email.
4. People I’ve been recommended to and will likely meet soon.
5. Real-life friends of real-life friends.
6. People who are my “friends” or “fans/ followers” on other social networks.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs with some of these types, but at least in my small Facebook network, I’ve covered all the categories of friends. How is your Facebook network doing, and what categories do your friends fall into?

However, if you’re a business, things may not be so simple. Facebook has been promoting Pages instead of account profiles for businesses. But it seems that to prevent squatting of usernames once vanity URLs are available, Facebook has put a few limitations on qualify. Mashable discusses it more in detail, but the gist is that if you have only a Facebook Page (which many but not all businesses do), you can only have a new username/ vanity URL if the Page was created by May 31/ 2009 AND has at least 1,000 fans as of that date as well. As the Mashable article says, that’s not an easy task for many small businesses.

So, you’re sold on the idea of using a social network for an online project that you’re involved in.

Question: would you rather use Facebook Connect to build a niche social network, knowing you’re giving up control of member information, or would you prefer to build a network from the ground up, thereby insuring that you have control over all member information?

Of course, the first option is less effort, but you pay the cost of not having access to full member info.

The second option requires effort and promotion, but does not necessarily preclude using Facebook tools/ plugins. If you use BuddyPress (which requires WPMU – WordPress Multi-user) to build your social network, then you do have control over customizations. That means you can plug in FB tools, if available, or write your own FB integration code.

So it should be easy to see that what you choose depends on your abilities or budget. If you don’t know how to build your social network on the BuddyPress platform, with customizations, or if you don’t have the budget to hire someone to do that for you, then you’re left using Facebook Connect, or maybe Ning or one of the other social networking platforms.

Personally, I like have control of data, when it comes to my own projects, and fortunately I can customize existing Open Source code if I want to, though I never seem to have the time. So the dilemma continues.

I suppose it depends on how you use it, how you set your security settings. My own use has been growing slowly. The vast majority of my friends on Facebook fall into 5 categories:

1. Blogging colleagues.
2. Real-life community friends I’ve known for many years – or other community members recommended to me.
3. People recommended to me by other FB friends.
4. People who added me because they know me on other social media/ networking sites.
5. People who have added me and whom I’ve added back.

As to how I use FB, well that is a strategy that’s still developing. For the most part, I communicate with my real-life community friends, participate in groups we’re all part of, check out their wedding pictures, and so on. I also use my status message to post URLs of interesting articles and videos, as well as to promote a selection of my new articles from various sites.

The flaw of FB – in my eyes – is that there’s a sore lack of privacy “out of the box”. If I add someone or comment on their pic, every single one of my FB friends knows it. So if I were to be as active on FB as I used to be on Twitter or especially Plurk, then it might annoy FB friends. Thus sof far, I haven’t grown my FB network as much as I have with Twitter.

How do you use Facebook in your daily web work?