I had no idea, but apparently Facebook’s walled garden has a public directory. I had just assumed that everything in Facebook was behind a login prompt, but I found out via a FaceReviews post that a large number of Facebook users, depending on their privacy settings, have public profile pages, and have had so for the last six months. Here’s what one looks like:
(apologies to Rachel for using her page, but it was the first one listed in Google, which I guess is some sort of honor)
Search engine visitors get to see your profile pic, five of your friends (and a convenient link to see five more at a time), and whether you post a lot of pictures, notes, join a lot of groups, and have a lot of people posting on your wall. Clicking anything on the page (except to refresh friends) results in a registration prompt, so that’s all there is to it.
So, really, this is a message to everyone on Facebook that you need to understand how important it is that you know your profile might be in Google. If you don’t like it, you can go into your settings and change who can find you in search engines to something more limiting. If you don’t take yourself out of the search engines, then you might want to change that picture of you and the beer bong at that wild party from being your profile picture.
In the meantime, we can be happy to know that Steve Rubel’s got a public profile, as does Robert Scoble. If you’d like to add me as a friend on Facebook, click here (but you’ll need to be signed in).
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