Two stupidly simple questions.
1.) Whenever a particular friend of mine on Facebook writes anything to anyone else, it appears on my “News Feed” page. I feel like I’m spying on her. How do I know if the same thing is happening when I write on someone else’s page? Does it go to everyone I’m friends with? If so, what are the settings to make it stop?
2.) What or where is my “wall”? Is it the news feed page?
I’ll answer in reverse order:
You’re “wall” is the page people come to write on when they want to talk to you. When you’ve been “writ[ing] on someone else’s page”, you’ve been writing on their wall.
And you can’t make it where other people don’t know, as long as they are friends with the person whose wall you are writing on. You can only do that on your own wall. If you want a private conversation, that’s what the Messaging system is for.
Facebook used to allow you not to send out those Nanny messages, but they removed that ability with the last security upgrade, replacing it with the ability for you to restrict who sees what on your own wall. Humorously, I found out when HazleNutCoffee was here complaining about it.
I am reading my friend’s entire long conversations between her and a friend of hers. It seems very odd to not be able to turn that broadcasting off.
Your friend is communicating on what is effectively a public message board. It is up to her to use private Facebook messages if she prefers people not to follow her conversations. So it’s not odd to not be able to turn the broadcasting off, if you don’t want it broadcast, use the private messages.
From what I can tell, your only options for not seeing the conversation are: hide your friend’s updates (which means you won’t automatically see any of their updates any more) or unfriend your friend.
As for controlling what others see, you can put your friends in lists and limit who can view what you write. If you go into Account and Edit Friends, you should see the options.
Then, when you go to add an update, before you hit share, click on the lock icon and select customize. You’ll see an option to direct the comment to a specific list or only specific friends.
Here’s the help page with a full explanation.
Compare it to SDMB. The ‘wall’ is like this thread we’ve been posting in here, where anyone can see it. If you don’t want people to see your conversations, you take to Private Messages, which Facebook has as well.
The difference between Facebook and SDMB is that you only see what your friends post (Facebook), not what every single person in the community posts (SDMB). So say that on the SDMB, we had the option of only reading what certain people (our friends) wrote. It would look similar to Facebook in that you would only see your friend’s activity. Facebook has the added function that it alerts you to your friends conversations via your home page.
Okay, I guess that makes sense.