Facebook feed changes and you
viral advertising, but it really is. Sort of the way music videos are really advertisements for music.
4. Bizarrely predictable/predictably bizarre: A whole industry has sprouted up around tracking Facebook algorithms, user activity, designs, applications, and their implications for advertising.
See, for instance, the site AppData: Independent, Accurate Facebook Application Metrics and Trends from Inside Facebook. Seriously. People make a living trying to figure out how to use Facebook to sell crap to us. They study the “Facebook ecosystem” and its metrics to ferret out how to get the most bang for their advertising buck. Facebook plays a sort of give and take system with the advertisers. The sole purpose of most apps is to spam us with advertising. AppData’s sole purpose is to track Facebook app users.
Facebook plays a give and take game with app designers in terms of how app stories appear on your page. On the one hand, “one user’s single fan-join can translate into hundreds of brand exposures.” App developers want to get you coming to their product and app pages. The new News Feed is seen as a “continuous viral driver” for sending people to advertisers’ pages. On the other, Facebook keeps the algorithm top secret. Consequently, as those Facebook tracker wonks put it (with greedy eloquence):
The power and direction of the currents that carry information through Facebook’s oceanic social graph are shifting. This has major implications for every participant in the Facebook ecosystem. Why? Because as Facebook adjusts the dynamics of its viral communication channels, it also intrinsically shifts the incentives and opportunities for all actors in the ecosystem. Every application developer, page manager, and advertiser should be studying the decisions that Facebook is making in order to understand how Facebook’s shifting product plans will affect their business.
5. Twitterishness: Yes, Facebook is getting more and more Twitterish even though they deny it. The whole Live Feed is Twitterish (though they claim they had it first with status updates). They even stole the whole Twitter-style @tags (one cool improvement).
Both Facebook and Twitter are in “data deals” with both Bing and Google. Updates will be crawled and indexed by these search engines, which means more data trawling
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HA! I have to laugh at the statement, “They blame us for the change: Facebook claims that these changes were prompted by user feedback and the point is to reduce information overload.” What has happened is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE! Now we have TOO MUCH INFORMATION and most of it is the kind that most users DON’T WANT TO SEE and that is “Friend added friend” and “friend plays game and how many things he has” is the most USELESS things to see on FB now! If they (Facebook) did this to REDUCE information overlaod, THEY BLEW BIG TIME AND 99% of users I have talked too HATE IT HUST AS MUCH. See the Facebook group “Change Facebook Back To Normal!!” It has over 1.76 MILLION on there AND NOT ONE OF THEM LIKE THE NEW SYSTEM WHATSOEVER. Also digging a bit deeper and reading Facebooks own Privacy Policy we can see that Facebook is COMPLETELY VIOLATING it’s own privacy policy, Where
in your privacy settings does it say every single friend will be
notified on what friends you added in their news feed? It doesn’t! In
fact, the added friend setting (in privacy settings) says it applies to
YOUR wall as Recent Activity. This Facebook change violated their
privacy setting/rule. Not nice Facebook!
Yep!