A little over a month ago, Facebook decided to revamp its privacy settings in an obvious attempt to combat Twitter’s openness and overall Google friendliness. As most Facebook users can recall, a pop-up randomly appeared that asked the user if they wanted to keep their “old” settings or go for the “new” ones. The new security settings were already checked for the user, so most people probably just clicked “save settings” without giving it much thought. Overnight, this caused a massive amount of Facebook profiles, pictures, status updates, etc. to be immediately available to the public. Not only did this make the profiles publicly accessible, but publicly searchable through Google. Therefore, people inadvertently put their “personal” Facebook lives out in public for the world to see.

This brings up the continuing discussion of what to make private and public online. We’ve all heard the horror stories of college grads being fielded on Facebook by potential employers, only to find photos of the potential employees getting sloshed at parties. We’ve also heard the stories of employees complaining about the company they work for thought their publicly available twitter account, only to find themselves fired the next day for their comments.

With all of this in mind, it’s important to decide what content to be private, and what to be public on social networks. I think it’s OK to have personal content on social networks, you just need to be smart about it. If you want to post profane status updates that you really only want your real-life friends seeing, then make sure its done in a controlled and private way. For example, to do this safely on Facebook, you’d have to make sure all your content was being kept private (through privacy settings), that you have a tightly controlled “friends” list, and that you’re not a part of any networks (i.e. school, business, etc.).

A good way to balance both private and public content is to use Facebook for private networking with friends and Twitter as a public medium for publishing your thoughts. Of course, this really all depends on how you want to represent yourself online. For example, I tend to keep most of the profanity off the social networks I use because I don’t want to be represented that way online. I don’t want to offend anyone and don’t want anything like that to harm my personal brand.

In the end, you must decide how you want to represent yourself online and stick to it. If you want everyone in the world to have access to your thoughts, posts, and multimedia content, then go for it. If you want more privacy, then make sure you go through all of your privacy settings on the particular social network and set them up in the way you see fit.

With the launch of Google’s Nexus One today, we thought it would be important to talk about the importance of designing websites for mobile browsing in the new year. The numbers are in for December 09’: mobile browsing now accounts for 1.3% of all internet browsing. To the pedestrian, that might not seem like a large amount of users, but when put compared to December of 08’, there’s a big difference. Just one year ago, only 0.55% of all internet browsing was done on mobile platforms. We can only expect this number to grow exponentially in the coming year. With the prevalence of usable smartphones that provide a decent browsing experience going up, and the prices of these devices going down (with 2 year service agreements of course), we will see the amount of smartphone users continue to rise. As more people acquire smartphones and required lucrative data packages, mobile browsing will only continue to rise.

For me personally, I continually use my iPhone to surf the web and read news. However, when it comes to news and information, I am much more likely to go to websites that have mobile versions. It’s not that the phone can’t handle a traditionally formatted site, it’s just that sites designed for at least a 1024×768 screen resolution take a good amount of time to load and are not easily navigable on a small touch screen. Mobile versions are quickly loaded, formatted for small screen viewing/navigation, and take few system resources to run.

2009 was definitely the year that saw all the major cell phone manufacturers and service providers bringing usable mobile devices to the playing field. We also can’t forget the importance and growing usage of Apple’s iPod Touch for web usage as well. In the end, I feel that in 2010 we will see an explosion of web usage on mobile devices. There’s really never been a more important time than now to have a mobile version of your website. It’s a really good idea to be ready for this forthcoming explosion, and we’re here to make it happen. Give us a call or shoot us an email to find out about ProVim’s mobile web design services. We’ll design you a quick and easily navigable site for mobile devices that will give you the competitive edge in the web marketplace. So check it out, and get ready for the next decade mobile integration!