My public Facebook page

I’ve set up a pub­lic page for myself on Face­book that will fea­ture my work at Hawaii Pacific Uni­ver­sity and as an inde­pe­dent consultant.

My pub­lic Face­book page is located here and I also have a short URL for that page at http://snurl.com/fbillso/

This isn’t the first pub­lic Face­book page that I’ve built. In Sep­tem­ber 2009, I started a pub­lic Face­book page for the Hawaii Pacific Uni­ver­sity Com­mon Book Pro­gram as a com­pan­ion for the program’s web site, which I also built. I also nom­i­nated the 2009-10 Com­mon Book, Lit­tle Brother by Cory Doctorow.

In April 2009, I set up my first pub­lic Face­book page for local enter­tainer Andy Bumatai. Andy is a very funny man with a pas­sion for social media. He inter­viewed me back on 24 March 2009 about com­puter secu­rity and the Con­ficker worm. He has been man­ag­ing the page him­self and now has over 1000 fans fol­low­ing his page.

Keep­ing the per­sonal private

Most Face­book users have a per­sonal page that lets them run Face­book apps like Far­mville and link to other web­sites. Per­sonal pages also let users post and tag pho­tos and videos. While Face­book pro­vides tools to let users man­age the pri­vacy of these pages, the pri­vacy set­tings can be very dif­fi­cult to con­fig­ure prop­erly. See this CNN arti­cle called Shar­ing vs. your pri­vacy on Face­book for some more details.

Pub­lic Face­book pages are designed for indi­vid­ual peo­ple and com­pa­nies. The apps that run on a pub­lic Face­book page are geared towards enter­tain­ment, social media and marketing.

A pub­lic Face­book page also allows users to “like” a per­son or com­pany. Face­book is get­ting rid of the “become a fan of” but­tons that used to be used for these pages.

See this Adver­tis­ing Age arti­cle called Face­book Gives ‘Like’ More Love, ‘Fans’ the Boot and this AP arti­cle called Face­book To Scrap ‘Become A Fan Of’ For ‘Like’ for more details.

Related arti­cles

Here’s some other arti­cles that helped me make the deci­sion to set up a pub­lic Face­book page for myself.

This Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion arti­cle by Jef­frey Young called When Pro­fes­sors Cre­ate Social Net­works for Classes, Some Stu­dents See a ‘Creepy Tree­house’ grabbed me right from the start.

Jef­frey linked to Jared Stein’s 9 April 2008 arti­cle called Defin­ing “creepy tree­house”.

This New York Times arti­cle called Friends, until I delete you makes sev­eral good points about the vocab­u­lary of Face­book. I’ve got more acquain­tances than friends who fol­low my per­sonal Face­book page.

Tagged as: email, facebook, faculty, HPU, network, professor, public, social, social-media, student, teaching, twitter, university