As a co-worker and I at New Paradigm were discussing not too long ago, Facebook was missing a key component that was impeding it from rising above and becoming truly ‘great’. Imagine what the world [or, social networking world] would be like if Facebook could allow its users to organize their profile based on social graphs.

A social graph is a set of relationships, appropriate to a given purpose – for example, my social graph for work colleagues is different than my social graph for friends (or a party). I wouldn’t necessarily want to show these two groups the same things.

Now, whether or not Facebook is great is yet to be determined, but what I do know is that Facebook has made the smart move of improving their platform to offer users what they’re calling: ‘more privacy controls’. Facebook has introduced these additional ‘privacy’ settings to allow users to control who may see what and users can get pretty specific.

First of all, Facebook now lets users group their friends into different ‘lists’. Second, for each function on Facebook (online status, photos, personal info, profile…) a user can choose if they want ‘Everyone on Facebook’, ‘Friends of Friends’, ‘All Friends’, ‘Some Friends’, or ‘Only Me’ to see it. OR they may choose any of those options, for example ‘All Friends’ – EXCEPT for ‘this list’ of people or particular individuals.

After playing around with the new settings a bit (ok, I admit that I was pretty excited about this new functionality and was testing out how it worked with co-workers yesterday) these additional tools are slightly complicated to use. But then again, relationships are complicated and it takes time and thought to manage them offline… so why would it be any different online?