I believe that the best stories out there are ones that are from personal experience, filled with the joys and anguish we get ourselves into.  This is one of those.

Since I got my 73 year-old father to join Facebook and Twitter, he has had a ton of questions on how to use it.

“What is the difference between my Homepage and my Profile?”

“If I write on your wall, does everyone see it?”

“How do I tell just you that you are an amazing son?”

OK, I stretched the truth a bit oh that one but you get the idea.  Answering these questions for him took a lot of patience and some revisiting of previous lessons but I think I got him to good place on how to communicate appropriately on these platforms.  Luckily, my dad does not have a smartphone so would not need additional lessons on how to not embarrass oneself while out and about.

So, you might think that since I am such an active user and have the ability to teach others, I would be a master of all the nuances of the websites, as well as their slick iPhone applications.

Not so fast.

While I was on the iPhone app recently, I received a Facebook email, that I thought was just for my eyes only.  It was not a very complex email, and actually contained an invite to a nice party on the weekend.  Sweet – I’ll have something to do this weekend instead of catching up on episodes of 30 Rock.  I hit reply and went into detail about my week, what was going on this weekend, and some little quips that only my friend would have been able to understand.  I believed that my friend would respond with a smartass reply and all would be well in the world once I got back to my computer.

OOPS.

Upon return to the home base, I logged into Facebook and opened the email tab to find that the email my friend had sent to me had also been sent to a broad range of other people – some I knew and others I have never met before.  My “reply” had actually been a “reply all” even though the mobile application didn’t tell me one way or the other.  After apologizing to my friend, and realizing that I would not be going to the party this week so save myself from embarrassment, I knew there was a lesson to be taught so here goes.

For Twitter, the lesson is relatively easy to learn.  If you want to reply to someone’s post and are ok with everyone seeing the gem you just wrote, an @ reply is the way to go – this will show up in your profile feed and your followers can try to determine what original post this was attached to.  If you only want the original tweeter to hear what you have to say, then a direct message is the way to go. You two can go wild back and forth with your 140 characters and no one else will see.  For Twitter, the desktop and mobile apps work similarly so you can have a high degree of confidence that your messages are only being seen by those you originally intended.

And then, there is Facebook and the iPhone app.

You can post a comment, picture, video, or link onto a friend’s wall so that everyone can see how creative you are.  No problem there.  However, when writing emails on the website, you need to take a look at the top of the email to see if the communication is just between you and your friend or if it is a group email. In this case, if you want to reply to the entire group, you type your reply in the box and click “send to all.” If you only want your note to go to a single person in the email trail, you need to click the “Reply” text link next to their picture – this opens a separate email window where you can type your message to that specific person.

All good except in your inbox on the iPhone app.

Emails on the iPhone app do not tell you if they are group messages or just a chat between two people. This means that when you hit “reply” in an email, you won’t know whether it is going to just one person or to twenty.  Of course, you might be able to tell by what the original person wrote.  “Hello folks – dinner party on Friday at 7pm. Wanna come?” suggests that the email is to multiple people, whereas “Hi Tom, would you like to have dinner on Friday?” probably means this note is just between two people.

So how can iPhone users protect themselves?

The best way to prevent a red face and several versions of “I didn’t mean everyone to see that,” take special care to keep replies to incoming emails to just the facts.  If you would like the originator to know more detailed things, or have a private laugh between just the two of you, create a new email addressed to only them and then hit send.  While I think that the Facebook iPhone app is very easy to use, perhaps it is just a bit too easy, which got me into the pickle I was in today.  The world did not end and no one got harmed outside of my pride but I did learn a valuable lesson about how to use the newest technology.  I hope my insights will help you avoid a similar situation in the future.