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Facebook frustration

Ive been looking at Facebook for some time now investigating its various capabilities such as pages (fan pages), groups (centralized themed comments etc), and Personal pages/ walls. The goal is to see if any or all of these can be used to share information about inventions and business plans but at the same time encourage feedback and interaction. The promise of privacy and more open communication is also a big draw. For example I could share more detailed information with prospective investors than with the general public.

After many days investigation I keep running into brick walls. Facebook is so bent on being friend inclusive that it is painful to set up controlled access. The design of the privacy controls is always pushing you to be more open with information that it almost makes it impossible to create tightly confined access to private information. This also applies to people who want to share their life with friends but want to keep their life private from people just outside their (the friends) ring of friends.

Strangly, googlegroups is much better at doing this. The combination of info pages and email reply and post is very convenient and fast. Facebook forces you to go to your facebook page to respond to comments from friends... great for them and their branding but painful for us.

Also another big pain. Group comments and discussion items do not appear on your own wall! This means that you are unaware of activity in the groups you belong to and have to return to look for activity manually... this makes Facebook groups unusable... what shame... soooo, I'm going to try something really out there and experiment with using a Googlegroup as a personal web site!

Why? Because Im sick of not having interaction.

At the moment I am thinking of using a public group for my main pages and a private group (ie invitation only) for more in depth questions to answers. If you want to weigh in on the issue please make a comment below and suggest something better if you cvan think of it... am I missing something with Facebook?

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