choongyong.com

choongyong.koh July 1st, 2008

I blogged about Reach Singapore’s Facebook profile a few days ago.  Today, it was picked up by tomorrow.sg and I saw quite a number of visitors to my blog.  There is also a small debate at tomorrow.sg about this.

There was a blog that accused me of being rigid and quoted a number of other organisations with Facebook presence, like UNICEF Youth Voice.  Someone responded that the blogger too did not understand, that there is a difference between a User Account (which Reach Singapore’s was), Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages.  Rightfully said, because the violation I mentioned was with the use of a User Account to represent an organisation.  None of the other quoted groups/organisations used a User Account.

Going back to Facebook again to check out Reach Singapore’s profile, I realised that the User Reach Singapore also created a Reach Singapore Facebook Group today.  I was thinking to myself, at least they are pretty fast in responding to feedback, even when the feedback originated from elsewhere on the net.

However, when I refreshed the Reach Singapore User Account profile, I was confused.  The name of the profile was no longer “Reach Singapore”.  It has now become “Ho Chee Har”.

Now there is a small problem here.  What this means is, if you are one of the 300+ people who added “Reach Singapore” as a “friend”, you suddenly have someone you don’t know in your friends’ list.  If you chose the default settings when adding friends, your personal information in Facebook that you shared with your friends will now be available to Ho Chee Har.

This is a small problem because you can always remove Ho Chee Har from your friend’s list.  But it goes back to my original premise: if the platform was understood and the correct tools (Page or Group) were used in the first place, no such problem would have occurred in the first place.

• government , internet