Usually Friday is a lovefest for all those people we follow on twitter- we send them #followfriday (#ff) props for being so good to us. And it’s the day we use to skip out to a baseball game, take a long weekend, or ditch out of work early. But, I am choosing to spend it researching and learning about Facebook’s Open Graph and how it impacts my privacy and security. (Also, it’s pouring rain, so I serious doubt the Rockies/Marlins game is really going to happen. And there’s no hockey on during work hours.)

Given yesterday’s news and the constant changes to Faceboook’s privacy & security settings, I am more confused than ever. How does Facebook or third-party apps, share or use our information? It seems so overwhelming that it’s more complex than understanding derivatives and credit default swaps.

And I am not saying Facebook’s new “Open Graph” is as dire or complex as financial products sold in a backroom, I am saying this tool is equally confusing and that the average Jane doesn’t have the time to sit down and figure it out.

So it’s easy to just start sharing your information across all websites & platforms without thinking because it’s embedded and readily accessible.  (I don’t want to go as far as saying, “everyone’s doing it, but pretty soon, everyone’s going to be doing it.)

This is really important to me because I have kept Facebook private and don’t use it for business purposes.

When I learned about how exposed our data is on fan pages (now community pages), I decided to un-fan (“unlike” in the new lexicon) pretty much all the pages I belonged to- and it took forever! Do you realize how many pages we fan? It’s so easy, just a click. When you want to leave a fan page, you couldn’t just knock it off a list, you had to go to the page and scroll down to the bottom left and hit “un-fan.” Since I had been clicking on “fan” pages for a couple of years- I had 181 fan pages. It took forever to get off all of them. (There was a benefit to this- my pages are not junked up by every cause, product or organization I loved- it’s just news from my friends. That made for a more enjoyable experience.)

I am not a conspiracy theorist, nor do I sit around worrying about my data in the “cloud,” but this seems to give me less control and I wonder how that will impact my life.

I have not had time to read through all the information; I will and write a post for next week. Today my day is “Facebook Friday.” I will read through Facebook’s new Privacy Guide and a lot of analyses to come up with my own opinion. For now, I leave you with some resources to help you formulate yours (or you can go down to the Tattered Cover for “Book & Lovers’ Day” and have an Ovaltine to warm your bones, on this cold, rainy day).

For those of you starting to wade into what Facebook’s Open Graph means for you, here you go:

Facebook’s privacy page.

Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet has a great post on the war between Facebook & Google.

Robert Scoble discusses Facebook’s Ambition based on attending yesterday’s Facebook Press Conference. Video interviews with experts and of the press conference itself are enlightening, to say the least.

When I moaned about all the changes at Facebook @bethpartin shared this PCWorld post on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.

Ultimately, it is our responsibility to manage our security and privacy.So many websites are installing the Open Graph(it takes about 10 minutes), we may have to use it if we want to participate fully in the web. That’s what concerns me most. Or, if I ever have kids, I can move them to rural North Dakota and we won’t have to deal with this…highly unlikely.