It's becoming almost impossible to hide from the network...

It turns out that Facebook’s mapping of the world’s social connections goes beyond even its 500 million+ members.

In an interesting little experiment, the BBC’s Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones demonstrates that it knows a fair bit about you even if you haven’t signed up yet.

He sets up a profile for a friend who has not used Facebook at all before and it suggests friends based on existing members who have emailed her before.

You can read more about the experiment on Rory’s blog.

This actually solves, or confirms the solution to something that puzzled me for a while. I’d done some PR work a long time ago for a private individual some years ago and Facebook kept suggesting that I should be their friend, and yet there were no connections at all in our networks.

After a while I realised that my webmail account which I log into Facebook with was most likely where the service was able to make the connection. Still it felt eery.

Rory also points out that this shows how it is possible to to set up a profile for somone without your actual permission – another example of online identity theft risk.

The moral of the story? As I say in the second rule of Me and My Web Shadow: Be the best and first source of information about yourself. That means even if you don’t want to be an active Facebook user, you should establish your online profile so that people can find you.

Facebook is increasingly being used as a kind of form of identification online now for other web services too, so securing your Facebook profile should really be part of guarding your online identity.

And after all, if Facebook knows who you are and who you know anyway, what’s the point in staying off of the network?

Open University blogger Tony Hirst posted today about an interesting way he had of seeing what his “Google impact” was: the automatic Google Suggest service which tries to anticipate what you might be searching for. You’ll notice it especially when you are typing a phrase into the Google home page and it is based on what people most commonly search for.

Tony’s Google suggest profile is pretty long:

My own shows that people looking for me are most often looking for my blog or my Twitter profile:

Tony goes on to thinking about how you might measure your Google impact:

So what ingredients might go into a “Google Suggest” Impact Factor?

Number of correct mentions? Number of incorrect mentions? Explicit association with host university, or subject area?

And what might a Google Suggest Factor measure? Personal discoverability? Personal associations? Personal specialism areas?

In the comments to his post, someone called  R3beccaF suggests a measure based on combining your name with your profession or another qualifying phrase to gauge the size of your Google shadow:

In terms of impact that you can add to your promotion case, number of times you come up in a search for “your name” “open university” could be useful, because it removes all those references to Hollyoaks, Lemonrock and, in my case, the X Factor:
“tony hirst” “open university” – 3500
“martin weller” “open university” – 2890
“grainne conole” “open university” – 3600
“martin bean” “open university” – 14800

Both of these approaches are useful ways of looking more closely at your web shadow on Google. It will give you a sense of who else with your name is out there, how you might differentiate from them and give you a sense of scale.

Comparing yourself with someone famous in terms of shadow size isn’t that useful, so try a peer or colleague as a comparison to see how you’re doing. This will be especially interesting and useful as an exercise as you grow your online presence.