Anyway I knew all about the new iPhone, because it made top news this morning (more on it in a sec) but what I didn’t know was that the Windows Live Wave 4 Web Services have begun to roll out today, that was until I got home.

First I’ll address the new iPhone, I’m just not interested! Steve Jobs is a marketing genius who can sell people anything, especially things they’re never going to use or things that already exist or things that will actually be annoying. The big one seems to be the front facing Camera. Most smart phones (I know my HTC Touch Diamond does) already have a front facing camera, and guess what – I’ve never used mine and I don’t know many people who have used theirs either. The fact is, in Australia it’s too damm expensive to video call so what would you bother? If you’re going to video call iPhone to iPhone via Wi-Fi, then why not just use Skype on a laptop, which is the world leader for video chatting (or use Windows Live Messenger). Multitasking is actually good, looks well implemented, got to give Apple credit there, but iAds, oh hang on a sec… you’re trying to tell me, having pop up fully interactive ads in your apps is a good thing? I don’t want ads in my apps, I just want to use them. Every modern web browser comes with a pop up blocker, because we generally don’t like pop ups, so why would we want them clogging up our phones? One other good point, for the first time it seems that iPod Touch users will be allowed to upgrade to version 4.0 software (now called iOS 4) on their 3rd generation (and 2nd gen but missing features) iPod Touch for Free instead of having to fork out $20 or so. Apple peoples can download iOS 4 later this month and buy an iPhone 4 in July.

Moving on now to the news which I’m much more excited about, and the news which will probably gain an article on my main website once it’s all finished, Windows Live Wave 4 web services! The rollout has begun. I know most of you aren’t going to notice this yet, because currently Windows Live Hotmail and Contacts have not been updated (and most people I know only use Hotmail on the web, not the other wonderful services available), but everything else has. The new header means that you will be able to see at a glance on any page you’re on how many unread emails you have and how many of your friends are online and even start a conversation with them in the browser. The big thing for me though is that in Wave 3, Facebook, MySpace etc were all integrated into Windows Live, but they didn’t do much – this time, all the news feed updates from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and many many other services can be integrated into one feed that appears throughout Windows Live and (when the Essentials beta comes out) inside Windows Live Messenger). You’ll also be able to link up all your Facebook contacts with your Windows Live Messenger contacts (removing duplicates) and then chat to people through Facebook chat via Windows Live Messenger (which is awesome because I hate Facebook chat).

The other big one, is Windows Live Skydrive now has Windows Live Office – which means, Office Web Apps are here – WOOOO! Now these certainly aren’t fully featured (they’re a bit lacking actually), but when coupled with Hotmail when it gets updated soon hopefully, I see this as a massive time saver! Imagine getting an email with a Word Document attachment and editing and sending it back to the person without leaving Hotmail! It’s going to become a reality very very soon!

Anyway – I’ll leave it there, there will be a lot more in my article very soon, but I’m hoping you’ll all check out what’s currently available and realise there’s much more coming! Hotmail is NOT updated yet, so you’ll have to go to http://home.live.com/ if you want to see the changes!

This is an example of a community page for a school. The Related Posts by Friends section isn’t a big deal. Any of your friends who uses the words in the title of the page, in this case “Ormiston College” in any of their statuses or posts, will appear on this page, this section will vary between each person due to who their friends are and what they’ve said. The bigger section is the one which says Related Global Posts. This will list anything Facebook can find on Public Profiles about the topic, again in this case “Ormiston College”. So if you have a public profile, then you gotta be really careful about what you say when you mention words that could appear on a community page where they could be seen by anyone.

The easiest way to solve this is to make sure your profile is Private.

You can do this by going to the Account menu on the top right of the screen and choosing Privacy Settings and then clicking the Profile Information link. On this screen, set at a minimum the Posts by Me, Posts by Friends and Comments on Posts sections to Only Friends. It’s probably a good idea to set them ALL to Only Friends. As you can see below – I’ve also created another list and am setting custom settings applying to that list (which I’ve named probation).

At this point, while you’re fixing your privacy settings, I’d also check your contact details settings, by clicking Back to Privacy and then the Contact Information link. Here you can set what pieces of your contact information (phone, address, e-mail) etc appear to the public too. I’d set most of these to Only Friends as well.

So yea, I’ve hoped this little tutorial has helped with securing your Facebook Profile. These Community Pages are part of a bigger picture, but if you want them to work in your favour, then you gotta lock down your profile a little bit.

BTW: I happen to disagree with the comments in the pictures above, just to make sure you know!