Funny how Facebook has become the Switzerland of instant messaging among my friends. Some of us were on AIM, some were on Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and some were holdouts on ICQ. Before, in the ICQ/YIM/AIM days, the client and the protocol were the same thing. If you wanted to talk to someone on YIM, you had to use YIM. There was some “openness” to the various protocols (although a lot of it was reverse engineering in the beginning), and you saw clients like Pidgin able to talk on multiple networks.

Then Facebook came out and folks started spending a lot of time on there. Eventually Facebook implemented its own instant messaging chat.

The problem with Facebook’s Web-based chat is that it was that you had to be on Facebook all the time. Furthermore, it was always a little flaky. Sometimes messages would get stuck in “sending” mode, and sometimes friends would drop on and off without reason. I also think a fair number of chats were terminated because a user would navigate — accidentally or on purpose — away from Facebook.
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I really like Facebook. I have reconnected with old friends, and stay in touch with current ones. My local comic book shop has a group on Facebook, and one of my friends sends out invitations for various store events. Facebook is a good time.

However, there came a point where I had several sets of friends. Some of my friends are very close to me and with whom I have no barriers or filters. I don’t mind if they see any of my data on Facebook. There’s a larger subset of friends I don’t see as much, or “super-acquaintances” whom I like I lot but aren’t fully integrated into my life. Then there’s a smaller set of people whom I don’t want to know everything about me. Most of those people are from work (I now work in a really corporate, stodgy environment), but there are some friends-of-friends or way old timers that I didn’t really want having my phone number or whatever.

I had no idea how to keep these people separate, so I just omitted a lot of information, like this blog address, or my AIM screen name, etc. That is, until I read the EXTREMELY excellent 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know article by Nick O’Neill. The first thing I did was set up a Friends List on Facebook for all of my co-workers, and then I shut off their access to most of my profile.

Here’s how you can make a friends list of your own, and how to secure parts of your profile from that list.
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One by one, I’ve added friends from high school to my Facebook account. I graduated in the early 90s, which (partially) explains my absolutely insane mullet/silk jacket/rayon shirt/black leather tie get-up in one of my school pictures. The other part of the story is that I went to high school in Utah. My mother and stepfather worked there at the time. None of us were Mormon (the dominant religion of the state), and I had no idea what I was in for when I moved at age fourteen.

I met a lot of people who were different from me while I was in high school. Although I still keep in touch with my friend Alex, most of the people I knew back then have been distant memories. Every once in awhile I wondered how some of my classmates had gotten along, but I assumed they were still stuck in Utah. Utah’s culture has a very strong gravitational pull.
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