A sizable portion of Facebook’s 400 million users are up to something. That’s what Google Hot Trends showed last Thursday evening and the following Friday morning. The keyword phrase says it all: how do I delete my Facebook account. This is, by all means, unusual collective behavior among its users–considering how it’s grown to be the largest social networking site in the Internet with a population only smaller than 2 other countries.
So what’s the big deal?
If you check your Facebook account (assuming that you still have your account intact!), you’ll notice how there are changes in your profile page. Now, your interests are reflected by previous pages that you have previously ‘become a fan of’ but, with changes in the infrastructure of Facebook, you already ‘like’.
What exactly does this mean? All the previous information about yourself, your likes and interests have been scrapped out and replaced with actual Facebook pages. This is certainly a surprising turn, considering Facebook never directly communicated changes such as these. As a matter of fact, a brand new privacy complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission shows just how many people oppose this sudden move of Facebook.
MoveOn.org pretty much says it all with this image below:
What is Facebook trying to do?
So, for every user, what exactly does these changes mean?
For one, it means that you’re going to have to go back to your personal information page and redo everything you’re previously written–just so you can let people know what your interests and likes are.
But there’s a more serious issue behind this. Regardless of your privacy settings, people can now have direct access to information about you and what’s in your mind….whether you like it or not. This is a huge jump from what Facebook previously asserted as their promise to keep information about you private, now isn’t it?
Or could it be related to what was previously concluded in the study of Nielsen about the effectiveness of marketing brands in Facebook? If you think about it, the new structure of Facebook allows users to become more transparent when it comes to their interests in products. The network of a single Facebook user alone is exposed to the brands that the same user mentioned in his or her personal page.
In one way or another, these changes in Facebook have resulted in some sort of implosion among its many users. With these changes, are you going to stick around or are you already planning your departure?