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In fact, even those people who know exactly how this new feature works may need to be on guard against sharing some seriously embarrassing updates.

For those not in the loop: Facebook is making sharing even easier by automatically sharing what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps. Instead of having to “Like” something to share it, you’ll just need to click “Add to Timeline” on any website or app, and that app will have permission to share your activity with your Facebook friends.

What activity, you ask? It could be the news articles you read online, the videos you watch, the photos you view, the music you listen to, or any other action within the site or app. Facebook calls this auto-sharing “Gestures.”

Can you see the possible issue here?

I’m pretty familiar with this auto-sharing function since it’s been a feature of The Huffington Post for a good while now. The way it works there: Once you join the site, every article you read is shared with your friends via an activity feed (unless you switch that feature off).

So right now I can see that someone I know professionally read “Scarlett Johansson Nude Photos” and a male colleague, who will remain anonymous, recently read the following:

1. “Conan O’Brien Stares At Nicole Scherzinger’s Cleavage”

2. “Heather Morris On Breast Implants”

3. “Perrey Reeves Shows Off Bikini Body (PHOTO)”

I’m not saying this is a bad idea as such, but people need to be aware of what they’re signing up for when they add apps to the Timeline. Even my tech-savvy friends seem to set up these auto-share apps, completely forget about them, and return to doing things they wouldn’t necessarily want to share with all their friends.

Heck, I even find myself doing it.

Just a few days ago I added the Washington Post Social Reader app to my profile — this is one of many new news apps that auto-shares what you’re reading with your friends. Later, I returned to the app, forgot about that feature, read a ton of articles and realized they were all on my Facebook Timeline.

Now I didn’t read anything particularly saucy like my HuffPo friends did, but even that slight lapse was enough for me to uninstall the app completely.

So what can you do to avoid a Facebook privacy faux pas? Be aware that whenever you click a “Add to Timeline” button on a website or app from now on, you’re giving that app permission to post your activity to Facebook.

Most of the time you might be fine with this — like sharing the music you listen to on Spotify with friends (unless you like Rebecca Black) — but other times it might be worth disabling this function after you approve the app.

Should you worry about Facebook’s new Gestures functionality? No, but even the most technical among us should be aware that sharing everything is not always wise, and that selecting the right privacy settings can protect you against any mistakes.

READ THIS NEXT: Facebook Privacy: 3 Fights to Expect When You Get the New Timeline

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

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After the big F8 conference yesterday you might be thinking I would really like to be one of the first people to have the new Facebook Profile Timeline now before it is integrated in a few weeks.  Well here is a step by step from the Huffington Post Tech on how to integrate it now in just a few steps.  Remember to always check your Facebook Privacy settings when Facebook updates since they seem to always change it.

TechCrunch found a method for getting the new profile immediately. The new profile and apps were announced at the f8 Conference for Developers, which means those developers need to be able to access the new Facebook in order to design their apps. This means that, if you register with Facebook as an app developer, you get the new Facebook.

How do you do that? Pretty easy. Watch this video and follow the steps:
[The steps in the video are outlined below].

1. Get the Developer Facebook app. Type “Developer” into the Facebook search bar and click on the first result. Click “Allow.” Now you’re a developer.
2. In the top righthand corner of the Developer app, click on the “+ Create New App” button. Fill out the App display name and description. (Just make something up or type gibberish; this won’t actually create an app that will be visible).
3. Agree to the Developer privacy agreement. TechCrunch says you need to have a “verified account” for this, which means that you’d need to have a credit card attached to your Facebook profile; I don’t have a verified account, however, and I was able to get the new profile.
4. Find the “Open Graph” on the left sidebar and type in a test verb and noun for your new app. I started a “Bake a Cake” app, so my test verb will be “Bake” and my test noun will be “Cake”:
5. Run through a few pages of new app information. No need to enter anything here, just keep on saving changes and continuing.
6. In five to ten minutes, you’ll have an invitation at the top of your Facebook profile to try out the new profile. WARNING: It might be buggy.

[UPDATE: If you decide afterward that you don't want the new timeline for any reason, it's very easy to revert back. Go back into your "Developer" page and click "Edit App." This will bring up a sidebar on the left side of your page. Click "Delete App." After you do this, your profile should be reverted back to the original.]

This is option one and is obviously not for everyone. Option two is to sign up for beta notification right here. When Facebook is ready for users to test out the new profile, you will be emailed and get to try out before all of your friends.

And voila! Those are two ways that you can get the new Facebook profile immediately, if you’re desperate for the change.

Check out some pictures of the new Facebook below before you make your decision (and read all about other huge changes to the ‘Book here):

SOURCE:  Huffington Post

Facebook is a great tool for connecting with people all over the world but like anything it is important to know the “How To” on how to be safe online.  Facebook has always had controversy over the idea  of privacy.  The latest thing to hit the excessive boundaries is the use of photos for Facebook Ads.  “ATTENTION: On Friday, Facebook will become owner of the publishing rights to ALL your private photos. You need to make a simple change: go to ‘account’, ‘account settings’, ‘Facebook ads’(along the top), ‘ads shown by third parties’, choose ‘NO ONE’ then SAVE.” Facebook is a great tool but remember to be safe when surfing the online world.

Here are 10 other important privacy settings to know on Facebook.

1. Use Your Friend Lists

I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”

There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:

• You can add each friend to more than one friend group
• Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
• Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.

Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).

You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.

2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results

My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.

How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:

1. Visit your search privacy settings page
2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
3. Click “Save Changes”

By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.

3. Remove Yourself From Google

Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.

For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.

By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.

4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake

This is the classic Facebook problem. You let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.

At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.

Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.

5. Protect Your Albums

Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.

There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.

6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds

Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.

I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.

There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.

Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.

Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.

Become a fan of AllFacebook to stay up to date on the latest Facebook privacy changes.

7. Protect Against Published Application Stories

This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”

This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.

More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.

8. Make Your Contact Information Private

I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.

The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.

If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.

For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.

As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.

9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts

Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things.

Adjust Wall Posting Visibility

Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.

Control Who Can Post to Your Wall
In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.

From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.

10. Keep Your Friendships Private

While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.

Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.

Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.

Source:  10 Facebook Tips

Here is the new site for Brad Tiefenthaler a snowboarder out of Montana.  It is another custom action sports resume/blog website done by us here at Snow Technologies.   Check it out here www.BradTiefenthaler.com

SOURCE:  MASHABLE.COM

This year, startups and brands are hungrier than ever to capitalize on the Super Bowl and the anticipated volume of conversations that will spill over on social sites by association. In doing just that, Foursquare will be testing out two new ideas: A global promoted venue and redemption codes attached to badges.

The location-based mobile game is trading in the local appeal of its service for a day and working with the NFL on something more global in nature. On Sunday, all Foursquare users will see the same promoted trending venue — “Super Bowl Sunday” — for the duration of the game.

Foursquare will be doling out team-themed Super Bowl badges to Steelers and Packers fans who check in to the promoted venue and include the name of a team in their shouts. Foursquare users at the game can unlock a special Super Bowl XLV badge if they check in to the stadium.

More importantly, every unlocked badge comes with a unique redemption code that badge holders can use for a 20% discount on select merchandise at NFLShop.com.

Foursquare fans will appreciate the badges and the merchandise discount, but there’s much more to this promotion than ephemeral trophies and sporting memorabilia.

The “Super Bowl Sunday” manually promoted venue is a notable tangent from the startup’s everyday fare of venues promoted by popularity. For starters, Foursquare will likely see its most venue checkins to date. Then, of course, is the potential for the startup to open up promoted venues to paid advertisers.

Badge holder redemption codes are also something we’d anticipate the startup will proffer to future partners to better tie Foursquare activity to actual sales.

A Foursquare representative stressed that this particular promotion is merely an experiment and that no money is changing hands. But, in testing badge redemption codes and Foursquare-promoted venues, the startup seems to be laying the foundation for products with advertiser appeal.

The latest version of Facebook for BlackBerry is not only faster than previous releases, it also has a bunch of new features that make the app more on par with what the iPhone and Android clients offer: a new navigation bar, enhanced listings for friends and Pages, Facebook Search and a dedicated inbox.

Facebook for Blackberry 1.9 is available through the BlackBerry Beta Zone, which is free with signup

Here are some of the highlights of the new version:

• Dedicated Inbox – You can now choose to view your Facebook messages within your BlackBerry messages inbox or in its own separate inbox just for Facebook.
• Facebook Messages are also now synchronized with the inbox on the web.
• Facebook Search – You can search for individuals and Pages and then send a friend request to individuals or “Like” a Page if you so choose.
• BlackBerry 6 users can get Facebook info from the universal search widget now, too.
• Updated Friends and Page Lists – Friends and Pages are now organized in tabs and include thumbnails so that you can select a friend or Page to access to see individual information or updates.

We’re glad RIM is keeping Facebook for BlackBerry updated. In a pre-iPhone universe, the Facebook app for BlackBerry was actually one of the best. It’s fallen behind the competition a bit, but we appreciate how RIM strives to keep Facebook integrated with other aspects of the OS.

BlackBerry users — do you use the official Facebook app or do you access the mobile or touch website instead? Let us know.

SOURCE:  Mashable.com

Update: Windows Phone 7 has now been officially announced. Check out our gallery of Windows Phone 7 smartphones for more details.

Initially released 10 years ago, in April 2000, Microsoft’s mobile operating system – Windows Mobile – was once a dominant force in the smartphone and handheld market. Things change: After Apple’s iPhone completely altered the way we think about smartphones, followed by Google’s increasingly popular mobile platform Android, Windows Mobile devices just didn’t have what it takes to compete with the new breed of smartphones.

Enter Windows Phone 7. After the transitional phase that was Windows Mobile 6.5 – and let’s face it, it really was no more than a quick fix, with Windows Mobile’s overall market share plummeting month after month – Microsoft has finally decided to embrace the new smartphone philosophy. It threw away the stylus and created a completely new, finger-friendly UI, coupled with an OS that enables easy integration with Microsoft services Xbox Live and Bing, as well as social networks such as Facebook.

Today at 9:30 a.m. ET we’ll learn about the actual devices powered by Windows Phone 7, coming from handset makers such as Samsung, LG and HTC. It all sounds promising, but we already know about a couple of Windows Phone 7’s drawbacks: apparently, devices based on WP7 won’t support copy and paste, and tethering.

What do you expect from Windows Phone 7? Will everything go smoothly, or will there be bugs? Will developers embrace the new platform, and will we see a decent amount of Windows Phone 7 apps in the near future? Please, share your opinion in the comments.

SOURCE:  Mashable.com