Facebook has been frought by privacy concerns within the past month.  Some people have deactivated their accounts, or tuned up their skills to keep their profiles more private and restricted.   However this post isn’t about privacy, or how to delete your account.

Personally i feel that you should use the platform (or any platform for that matter) and tools to your advantage instead of worrying about issues that you can’t really control.  What you CAN control is:

• Your privacy settigs. (once you’ve developed those skills)
• You have complete control over what you share or post.  Just make sure you don’t  make anything public that you’ll regret.
• Most importantly you have control over what you’d like to see in your stream.  (Facebook doesn’t offer too many filters, but enough to morph your News Feed into a news aggegator)

Note:  I’m NOT deactivating my Facebook account as the people and content there provide more than enough value for me to stay.  Rather i’ve set up my account to receive news and updates from friends and news sites across the Facebook Platform.

I think you might benefit from this as well, and make Facebook a one stop shop for all your requirements.   This is great for busy people on the go as well.

Step 1:  Setting Your Signal Up For A Funnel Of News

Your first step is to add or as Facebook call’s it “Like” some of the pages you are interested in receiving news from.  For example if i type in “The New York Times” into the search bar i get a return query of just that exact page.  Now all i need to do is “Like” that page after clicking through.  Note that by liking you are becoming a fan of that page.    Similarly you need to repeat those steps until you add about 15-20 pages that are relevant for your news feed.  Here are some pages that i’ve added that might help you get started with your feed.

• CNN International
• BBC News
• Faster Times
• The Guardian News
• Telepgraph News
• Harvard Business Review
• Business Insider
• The Economist

Again go ahead and add what’s relevant for you.  This could be a group of friends / early adopters / musicians et cetera that you’d like to watch closely.

Step 2:  Editing Your Home NewsFeed Options

If you’re reading you should know there is a difference between your Profile and Home feed.  We will concentrate on the Home feed for now.  Navigate over your home feed and on the bottom look for “Edit Options”.  Why you need to do this? Simply because the  Live Feed automatically determines which friends to include based on who Facebook thinks you want to hear from most.

Refer to the above screen -shot for help.  In the “Show More” field start typing in the names of the companies / feeds that you’d like to show and then add them into the list.  I’d recommend adding at least 15-20 for a firehose of content.  Remember: Adding the pages to your profile by liking them in step one is crucial here or Facebook won’t pick them up in the “Show More” field.

Lastly adjust the the maximum number of friends to the positive integer 1.  This will ensure a clean signal of news feeds without the clutter of your friends updates.  Don’t worry you’ll be able to see all your friends updates in the “Top News” section of your Home News Feed.

All you have to do now is save your options and navigate to the “Most Recent items” (there is a difference between most recent items, and top news) in your NewsFeed.  You’ve now  managed to setup a news aggregator successfully on Facebook to track all the relevant news and views that interest you.

Most importantly you now have a clean signal of friends, family and NEWS to start discussing and liking.  Why deactivate your account when @Facebook provides a plethora of content for your benefit?

It’s all upto you to use the tools correctly and benefit from them..

Start off your week with some great topics on what’s happening on the web in 2010 and beyond..

The Evolution from Numbers to Relevance
Social media and Businesses on the web today are driven by the numbers game – of traffic, page views, and follower numbers. But the trend I foresee is:  The web is evolving from a numbers model to a relevance model.

The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.

EdgeTheory: Is Our Social Activity Sanitized, Inauthentic?
In the social Web, we talk a lot about being transparent and open. But many of us are limiting what we say online to a specific topic. We’re sharing links and associating with people who share our viewpoints, and possibly avoiding hot-buttons like politics, in favor of talking about technology and tools. Is this the right thing to do, or have we gone too far in terms of being willing to share who we really are?

Collecting related content isn’t curation [Rebuttal]
Rather than explain all the reasons why the word curation is so wrong for a conceptual content collection, organizing and displaying tool that Robert describes (which, by the way, I have nothing against), I’ll just point to Joanne McNeil’s essay rounding-up examples of the bastardization of the term on her blog, Tomorrow Museum.

The Editor and the Curator (Or the Context Analyst and the Media Synesthete) [Rebuttal]
“The promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the rolling plenitude of information. It’s the ability of individuals to choreograph that information in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the gravitational pull of a broad and open commons to ‘rip, mix, and burn’ — to curate.”

Below is  an  interesting link that I found particularly relevant

Culture and Trends Curator, YouTube – New York
This role requires a savvy, dedicated writer who enjoys discovering news events and trends as they develop on YouTube – and can relay what those trends say about how the Internet is changing society.

It’s been about a year that i’ve been using social media on a consistent basis, and i’ve certainly had my moments – That said my interactions have been overall positive.  However today I briefly wanted to jot down down some of my thoughts that most people don’t like talking about.  If you’re new or “one dimensional” please keep an open mind…

• Connecting: Social media isn’t the connector we think it is.  Meaningless relationships on many social networking sites hold no value when translated into the real world.  Look for people who you’d like to meet in person, and who are genuinely interested in your stuff.
• Volumes: Just like most business is about reaching the masses so is social media.  If you want to make it, target the masses.
• Value: Twitter (in particular) fries your brain, I feel the more you tweet the more you lose your concentration.  Stick to about 5-10 value tweets a day, blog more if you want to participate positively and contribute value to the overall eco-sytsem.
• User Base: If you’re looking to build your brand / name using social media attract the normals, as opposed to the digital early adopters (or) influentials.
• Men Behind The Curtain: Lot of social media is rigged by the men behind the curtain.  Just today i logged into an old Twitter account of mine and i was following people i had never seen before.  Guess what, they were all verified Twitter accounts…
• Noise: Who needs more than 10,000 followers?  I’d say who needs more than 1,000.
• Information: Interesting information is the key to success.  Draw your fans in by posting informative content.  Not regurgitating other peoples stuff.
• Sharing vs Over-Sharing: Don’t over-share, strike a healthy balance between your friends and your stuff.
• Numbers / Metrics: It’s not about the numbers, you’re setting yourself up for the trap if you think that’s what social media is all about.
• Monetization: I’ve thought alot about this. We all like to share, but there comes a point when you think to yourself  ”Am i making any money spending so much time here?”  If you are, great!  If you aren’t try learning a new skill or building something awesome instead.
• Ego: How much butt do i have to kiss to get noticed?  Alot, and what you have to ask yourself is “Is it worth it?”  If it is great!
• How to get noticed quickly: Try getting to content before others (or) share strong opinions on your blog (and) bash news content for more visibility (also known as negative publicity).

Sometimes taking a different perspective can add a new dimension to you as an individual.   That’s what social media should be about, new dimensions, different perspectives and the willingness to embrace multiple strategies.

We are going through some seriously exciting times with everything happening in the Search World. Just today Google Social Search has been born into its experimental phases. What Google Social Search does is help you find publicly available web content from your social circle quickly so you can see what your friends are upto. Take a couple of minutes and watch what Matt Cutts has to say about this exciting new age of Search in the Social World.

If you don’t have the time i’ve briefly outlined the key benefits of using Google Social Search Below, scan through them and start today.

What is Public Web Content?

What Google means by Public Content is simply content that you have published on Twitter, FriendFeed and other various online social services.  The most important item to understand here is that you have control over what you make publicly available to Google Social Search.

What Do I Need To Do For Google To Start Indexing Me In Social Search?

Google Social surfaces social content from 3 different places (Google Profile, Google Contacts and Google Reader) but as Matt Cutts says he believes that Google Profile will hold the most weight -he’s probably right too.

1. Google Profile: Go ahead and create a profile if you haven’t done so yet.  The important part to remember here is that you should add your Social Links (blogs, twitter, friendfeed etc).  By doing this you give Google the signal that you’ve opted in to make your stuff visible to the public, and once Google understands that it fetch your results from the different links you’ve added to your social search results.
2. Google Chat Connections: Another way for Google to add to your social graph is your chat buddies.  Whats important to know that Google doesn’t publish your list of chat buddies, instead it just adds to your Social Circle so you can see their public information.
3. Google Reader: Everyone has a blog these days, and if you subscribe to a particular blog in Google Reader then Google can surface a post from that blog in your social search results.

Remember that the most weight here is on your Google Profile and the social services you have added there.  For example on your twitter account you might be following 1,000 people;  well once you added those various online social services to your Google Profile  Google will now start adding those people within your social circle!!

Bear in mind for the Google Social Search to work for you, you must be logged into Google.  What are you waiting for, head over to Google Labs and start checking out your social search results!

What i love about Gary Vaynerchuk is his ability to paint a picture for “Non Techie” people and clearly explain how they can leverage Social Media today for their benefit. In this short interview with Abc News he briefly explains how he started using the web to his advantage and how the platforms today can help us brand ourselves into the future.

An interesting phrase Gary uses in many of his speeches that caught my attention was a term called “Sweat Equity” which describes the contribution made to a project by people who contribute their time and effort. Though the term “Sweat Equity” is Entrepreneurial in nature Gary strongly believes that the Social Web these days can be used by average individuals to help build and brand their products and services.

If you are looking to get inspired and learn along the way, Gary V. has the ability to put things in perspective for you – he did just that for me!

NOTE: If you want to cash into your passion now, be sure to check out Gary’s new book entitled “Crush It”. You can find it here.

Ask any prolific blogger and they’ll tell you social media is a full-time gig. Matter of fact, in this day and age of life-streaming people are choosing from a multitude of platforms to share and connect easily with their community. You ought to be able to setup quickly and get yourself out there as soon as humanly possible.

Posterous will help you do just that, and its free!!. Whether you’re just getting your feet wet or have been a long time blogger this simple platform will enable you to share your content quickly and easily.

The best feature of this stable platform is the ability to send posts via email. This is extremely useful because as the web and its networks evolve and grow, an increasing amount of people are looking for faster ways to drive their content to the web.

Get yourself out there without fuss

Posterous is a free service and makes it dead simple to post and share with others by utilizing email, which is already integrated with the applications we use on a daily basis. With the ability to post things online fast using email is a huge advantage especially when you want to document your thoughts quickly.

Post everywhere with the Auto-Post feature

When you post to Posterous, you have an option to also update all the other social media services you already use. There’s no need to post multiple times in multiple places, it can all be done via one email. This feature is very handy, after all who would want to post multiple times if you have the option to do it once with auto-post.

Easily post on the go with your mobile

Its as easy as 1,2,3 to post on the go. Mobile devices already have email built in, so you can send photos, video, and more to publish them online instantly. Posterous gives you the option to share your content with a wide range of devices including Android for T-Mobile, Iphone and just regular handsets.

Conveniently share content with others

Promoting your content has never been easier as you can add a widget sidebar that shows off all your posterous posts on your blog or another site. Also you can use the bookmarklet to share content from other sites. (Posterous supports a pletora of social networks.)

Explore, subscribe and engage with the community

Just like any other blogging platform, the ability to explore other networks makes it easy to engage with and find like-minded people from all over the world. Best part of a new network is connecting with bloggers and building your small community! So head on over there right now and start sharing and blogging with others!!

At the end of the day you want to be able to post frequently without fuss at any given location. Whether you are a first-timer, casual blogger, social media pro or just want to share with family members Posterous is the perfect solution for you. After all your thoughts need to be documented and shared quickly.

Related Posterous Links

• See who else is on the Posterous Network
• Tips of using the Auto-Post feature
• Setting up Custom-Domains
• Posterous and Google Analytics
• New Posterous Iphone App (geared towards media)