Facebook has morphed yet again. But this time, instead of just changing the interface, it actually changes your profile. My profile went from being something relatively custom-fit to me, to being a set of links to pages that are tangentially related to me.
Of course this makes sense from a business perspective, it makes it a lot easier to put together sets of interests to crunch numbers for advertising purposes. However, I feel the social value of my profile goes down, because anything that is not expressible as a "page" is no longer allowed outside of the Bio / Quotations field.
My knee-jerk reaction: delete everything that links my profile to other pages. If Facebook wants to make advertising $$ off of me, they'll have to infer things in a less obvious and heavy-handed way. Honestly, I'd rather have a stripped-down profile than one with links to pages that I don't really feel strongly about. It would not be so bad if it were an opt-in process, for example if I could mix linked content with unlinked content. However, being forced to use one mode of expression, i.e. linked pages, is unacceptable to me.
I won't go so far as to quit Facebook, it still has some value. For example, sharing thoughts with friends through the status updates, sharing photos and photo albums, and connecting/staying in touch with old friends. But for these things I do not need to be part of an inclusive web of linked pages in order to share information about myself.
It's bad enough when I don't know what Facebook is doing with my information. (I assume selling as much of it as possible without getting too much bad publicity.) However, dictating what I can and cannot say about myself, especially for mundane non-inflammatory things such as what movies I like, is draconian Stalinism that has no place in what should be an open environment for the dissemination of opinions and ideas.
Monday, 10 May 2010
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