[Your Cyber Persona] Facebook dethrones blondes everywhere, officially adopts ‘like’ as most-used word in vernacular
April 19th, 2010 by Dave StudinskiBig changes in the ownership of your social life, undoubtedly cuing riots of tens of thousands today as Facebook decides to do something not-so-slightly different.
Let’s review.
Out: “Fanning” pages
In: “Liking” Pages
Details from The Facebook Blog:
Feature certain connections: When you edit your profile, you can choose to feature some of your connections over others. You can drag and drop Pages above or below the fold to dictate which ones are most prominent when friends visit your profile. If you move a Page below the fold, your friends will still be able to see that connection if they click “See More” beside the field.
Out: Free-text statements of interests/likes
In: Automatic suggestions to existent pages for your likes/interests
Also from the blog:
Opt-in to new connections: When you next visit your profile page on Facebook, you’ll see a box appear that recommends Pages based on the interests and affiliations you’d previously added to your profile. You can then either connect to all these Pages—by clicking “Link All to My Profile”—or choose specific Pages. You can opt to only connect to some of those Pages by going to “Choose Pages Individually” and checking or unchecking specific Pages. Once you make your choice, any text you’d previously had for the current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile will be replaced by links to these Pages. [My formatting change] If you would still like to express yourself with free-form text, you can still use the “Bio” section of your profile. You also can also use features and applications like Notes, status updates or Photos to share more about yourself.
TechCrunch breaks down the changes, pointing to a possible privacy flaw in the new system:
One other thing to point out: historically users have been able to control who their activities and interests would show up for in their profile. They’re losing that ability today with the new changes, because Pages are considered publicly available information.
Privacy concerns aside, linking these terms to pages instead of search results seems like a logical change for the sake of page views. Yet, is “like” still too great of a commitment? It could futher discourage a collection of people for whom “fan” was way more than “just talking.”
Like, omigod, this is sure to cause some controversy!
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