Recently Facebook decided to expand their Timeline feature. Timeline was introduced to replace a user\’\s wall. It is meant to be a history of a user\’\s time on Facebook. So they started putting posts from earlier on the Timeline. Now when you go onto someone\’\s Timeline and go back a few years you will see posts by them and to them from back then.

This freaked people out. They thought private messages were being made public. This simply isn't the case. No-one is yet to provide categorical evidence that it is. Instead people are finding that these 'private' conversations were actually public.

I think what we are seeing is evidence of a shift in our interaction with social media. Back in 2008 it was really just students on Facebook and we were much more relaxed with how we conducted ourselves and what information was visible and what information was hidden. As Facebook has gotten bigger, and as of June 2012 Facebook has 955 million active users, people have become more careful about the information they share.

Then they are presented with how they acted back in 2008 with this new Timeline feature, and they can't believe they could have been so careless with regards to privacy.

Privacy is going to continue to be one of the key issues. As we enter the Information Age it's going to be more important that we can control what information is shared an what isn't. I don't think this bodes well for Facebook. They don't answer to the users, they answer to advertisers. I draw hope from more open services, like Diaspora or App.net.