As you know, Facebook is rolling out its new format for our personal profiles. Like it or not, it's happening. While the apparent intent is to make your profile more appealing and easy to use, make no mistake about it, the real intent is to increase the value of Facebook to its shareholders!
The redesign is all about encouraging users to add more specifics about themselves - interests, likes, even which tagged contacts in photos share your interests. That is so we will give Facebook information (data) that it can use to sell advertising. I'm not saying that's bad! In fact, I suppose if I had to say, I'd say that's good. After all, since we have to see ads on our Facebook pages anyway, they may as well be ads for things we're more likely to find of interest, right? Plus, Facebook's success is America's success! It's a USA company creating jobs and helping businesses that successfully advertise with them to grow and create jobs too. (Yes, I AM a proud capitalist.)
I think the only thing that bothers me about this change, is the disingenuous way that Facebook is hyping up all the benefits of the new profile yet intentionally stopping short of explaining how advertisers will be using the information WE post to target us with their ads, as well as how Facebook will be able to sell a ton (billions) in more advertising ads thanks to our willingness to personally hand over more personal information about ourselves than any other firm on the planet knows!
True, such a disclosure would have been more than other marketers make. But I think Facebook is an exceptional case to begin with. They could have easily added a short statement/disclaimer about advertising usage in the "tour" they posted on how the new profile works. And, if they offered this point openly to their users I believe they would have earned more trust and respect from their users.
Jan. 2011