Yeah, “Advanced” is specifically what I don’t like. I’m not talking about the privacy profiles of Public, Limited and Private. I’m talking about the “advanced” settings of “Just me”, “Some friends”, “Friends”, “My friends and their friends”, and “Everyone.” If I can set “Some friends” and be different friends for each case on a case by case basis then awesome. If I can only do it once for every case then it’s of limited use. It used to be that I could allow only “family” members leave and see notes on my profile for example. How do you do that now? Perhaps there will be a way with this limited friend setting, but Contacts haven’t upgraded yet. I can’t see what we can do there in the new Contacts till it arrives, and when I go into the old contacts and click on a category like “family” I get a message “Windows Live Hotmail wasn’t able to complete this request. Microsoft may contact you about any issues you report.” So if this is all there is with the new privacy settings then I’m not impressed. To be fair though, stuff on Skydrive still does allow you to use categories for sharing. This is not obvious as it was before, and that’s an oversite. It’s the same with Web Activities. I used to be able to share twitter, for example, with a small select group of other twittering friends so as to not flood the What’s new feed with my one sided conversations. People completely turned off ALL my updates when I shared these with everyone until I resorted to this. We have lost a lot of control with these new settings. The odd thing is that Facebook added these same privacy features in the second to last privacy update. You can post a link or share something and target it to a complely user defined audience even better than Windows Live ever could by including individual and groups as well as excluding groups and individuals. This limited friend thing might be the first attempt at an exclude – I’m not sure. So far, it appears to be just a group of friends that I haven’t limited in some way. Anyway, the most recent privacy update of Facebook just put the simple privacy profiles on top of the more complex settings to set them for you. You still have all the old settings, and I was hoping this would be the case with Windows Live. But alas, it appears not, and that they have gone backwards. For example, in Facebook you can still go back in and tweek things like who can post to your wall with infinite precision using the “customize settings” link. In Windows Live, you can share with as many as “Everyone” or as few as “Just me” in some cases but you can’t (it seems) share with just your “family” category. Then at another time share with “colleagues” etc.

Thanks Chris.