Facebook ReTweets Again
Following on from last week’s privacy bombshell, Facebook have sneakily rolled out a new feature which could potentially further impinge on user privacy – their version of Twitter’s popular ReTweet function, the Via feature.
The ReTweet or Via functions allow for a user to share another user’s post or link with their own friends list, giving the link or item a potentially bigger readership. On Twitter, this is simply done by typing RT @username before copy and pasting the post in, while Facebook’s new Via feature works by clicking ‘Share’ from an item posted in your news feed and a line saying “Via *Friend*with a link to their profile appears. Researching users as far afield as America, Europe and Australia has led us to believe that this new feature is live for all users. Give it a go yourself.
As it stands right now, the Via function only works for posted items such as videos or notes. You can’t currently share your friends’ statuses or updated pictures, but considering CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s assertations that ‘public is the new private’, we imagine that this new function isn’t far away as Facebook scrambles to stay atop the heap in the increasingly real-time-dominated web landscape.
As with everything Facebook-related at the moment, there are potential issues for users concerned about their privacy with this new feature, namely that if your privacy isn’t set to the right levels, a friend could share something you’ve posted and consequently spread a link to your wide-open profile to all their friends. If this isn’t something you want, be sure to put your profile’s privacy settings on full.
Jason Oconner is a leader in specialized online Advertising & Marketing providing smart tools and services to entrepreneurs and assisting them to establish their own small home-based online business.
