Facebook is driving me crazy. Only a few days after I made a post talking about how Facebook differs from Twitter and why I was changing how I use the Facebook service that Facebook decides to make major changes and become more like Twitter.
The gist of my previous post was that Facebook was meant more for connecting with personal friends and family while services like Twitter and LinkedIn led themselves more to networking. That is why Facebook has the privacy controls and the limit as to the number of friends you can have.
I also talked about how the seemingly proper way to network with the newly overhauled Facebook ‘pages’ where you can setup a Facebook presence for your business, project or personal brand and through participation in Facebook groups.
Not soon afterwords I noticed how Facebook changed their homepage to become more Twitter like. Now today I see that Facebook is loosening privacy controls making it easier for a users personal data to be viewable to search engines and to other Facebook users.
This is starting to piss me off, especially after deleting over 200 Facebook contacts, which it really did pain me to do, in order to align myself better with the spirit of their service. I began reserving my Facebook personal profile for family and close personal friends only with a promise to set up a Facebook ‘page’ so that I could communicate with my FB social media contacts, colleagues and co-workers.
At this point I am sticking to that plan, but I really wish that Facebook would make up it’s fucking mind and stay true to the spirit of their service that made them one of the fastest growing websites on the planet. Why change to emulate Twitter when supposedly Facebook grows a Twitter’s worth of new users every week?
Is it just me or is Facebook so scared of ‘the next big thing’ that they have forgotten that they are the big social network on campus, which they are….for now.
Please leave a comment telling me what you think. I’d love to hear how you feel about Facebook’s recent changes.