Our Facebook personas can veer from who we authentically are and the actual reality of our personal lives. On the positive side, Facebook connects people who have once shared an experience. You can become more involved in the lives of your long-distance cousin and her young family or easily stay in touch with an old friend. On the negative side, Facebook is a space where people want to display the best of themselves and their lives, which can arouse feelings of envy, loneliness and inadequacy within outsiders. As you nonchalantly scroll through your Facebook newsfeed, photos of your friend’s birthday party pop up. As you click through fun pictures of friends dancing at festive parties full of lavish birthday decorations, your heart sinks — because you weren’t invited.

Social Self-Sabotage

TIME Magazine’s Heartland reports that scientists from two German universities concluded that after studying 600 Facebook users, “one in three felt worse after visiting the site — especially if they viewed vacation photos.” Researchers discovered that users who didn’t post their own content were also more likely to feel discontent. It seems to be like emotional self-sabotage when people have negative experiences by logging onto Facebook, yet continue to do so.

In addition to feelings of social exclusion, you may subconsciously make comparisons to yourself with other people as you are subjected to posts and photos. Drawing comparisons can cause insecurities and make you question yourself. Feelings of loneliness and self-pity can surface just by seeing a simple Facebook status that changes from “single” to “into a relationship.” Perhaps you read a status about an old friend getting a job promotion, and suddenly you’re comparing your professional worth to someone whom you probably haven’t talked to in years. Commonly, young people also internally respond to engagements, wedding photos and pregnancy announcements with negative feelings and virtual, societal pressure to move on to that next step in life. Just as unhealthily, Facebook serves as a tool for many to be passive aggressive and indirectly spiteful. To be on the receiving end of a message meant to hurtfully get your attention can feel like a dagger in the chest.

Facebook is Subjective

According to Reuters, Institute Information Systems at Berlin’s Humboldt University research expert, Hanna Krasnova, said based on observations on negative social networking experiences, “people will then leave Facebook or at least reduce their use of the site.”

People experience anger, resentment, stress and jealousy over all types of Facebook timeline activities such as:

• Vacation photos
• Number of birthday wishes
• Number of “likes” and comments on postings
• Family happiness
• Physical attractiveness
• Work accomplishments

If Facebook feels like a toxic digital environment that personally affects you, eliminate those negative feelings by taking control of your own behavior. Deactivate your account, visit the site less often or make an effort to not internalize specific types of content that creates unhealthy emotions. Users who use Facebook as a platform for self-promotion are most likely to share content on Facebook that will “portray themselves in a better light.” In that case, photos and posts can be like judging a book by its cover. Things aren’t always as they seem.

Facebook privacy settings are great. Just a few minutes of tweaking allows you to create complex rules that makes sharing on Facebook easy AND safe.

Or so we thought.

I’ll start by prefacing this with two recent developments. The first is that Facebook is now one of Americas most trusted companies, and the second that around 65 million users are now accessing Facebook from mobile devices. It’s these two factors that make the following so concerning.

Have a look at the privacy settings below:

These settings allow friends to see wall posts with the exception of the “Employees” group. This group has specifically been removed rights to see wall posts. Or so the setting says…

This setting is does not work correctly and does NOT work at hiding any wall posts made from Facebook mobile (including the Facebook iPhone app). This bug is a massive privacy concern.

A friend of the above account in the “Employees” group could not only see wall posts from mobile devices, but also post to the wall, clearly against the privacy settings that were in effect. Wall posts from non-mobile devices were not visible.

The following screenshot shows a wall viewed from an account which has been added to the ‘Employees’ group with the privacy settings as above.

We have no way of proving we haven’t ‘shopped the screenshots above but feel free to try the settings with a friend to prove it to yourself. We also hope the previous hole we uncovered should give some credibility to our claims.

So there you have it. If you have your boss hidden from seeing wall posts, you’d better stop your friends posting on your wall from their phones…

On a side note, the privacy setting does work for status updates made from mobile devices. For concerns about your social networking posts showing up on search engine results, you may want to look into a service like Reputation.com which can help clean up your personal image

Screenshots posted in a note on the Facebook Design Page today may have revealed a little more than just the differences between rounded and square corners.

FBHive have noticed two mysterious new features on Facebook Product Designer Alexandre Roche’s profile. The first is a News Feed filter with a lab beaker icon labelled “Outside World”. The second is a plus (+) icon and number next to the Comment and Like numbers for a video in the Highlights section.

Screenshot and our thoughts after the jump.

We here at FBHive love free stuff (who doesn’t?), and this includes Facebook gifts. We love giving them and we love receiving them, especially now that they come with +1 credit  (that’s 10 US cents worth!). Sure, we could get into a debate about the intrinsic value of a virtual gift, but when they’re free – who cares!

Sadly, we feel that Facebook doesn’t do enough to promote these free gifts. An ad will appear in the sidebar occasionally, but for the most part, new free gifts are usually something we discover ourselves while browsing the Facebook Gift Shop. There is currently no way to be notified when something new appears.

With the old Gift Shop layout, the free gifts were easy to find because there was an option to sort by price. Now, with the recent redesign, that option has disappeared. Not only that, but some free gifts don’t even appear in the Shop – they can only be found on the Facebook Page of the company/product that’s sponsoring them.

So, as part of our regular feed of Facebook news, we plan to inform you whenever we discover a new free gift. Stay tuned as we play a bit of catch-up and let you know what’s currently available to be given away and make someone’s day (without a cent to pay).

Go here to see all the free Facebook gifts as we post them:
http://www.fbhive.com/category/free-gifts/

Oh, and just so you know…

Facebook’s Free Gift Rules

• You cannot give a free gift to yourself.

• You can give away the same free gift multiple times, but not to the same person.