Winning Hearts and Minds

I set out to write a little article about the Big Story on the Internet right now: the "new" face of Facebook.

What I found out was not-so-simply simple: nobody really gets it, and a lot of it had already been going on long before founder Mark Zuckerberg's Big a la Steve Jobs Announcement at Facebook's annual F8 (F eight... Fate, get it?) conference.

One friend of mine claims that Google is The Evil Empire. Another insists that "Facebook is Evil." In either case, it seems evident that there is an underlying desire on the part of both companies to rule the Internet, and probably for the same reason: money. But where Google takes the No People Required path - that is, its interest seems to be mainly in the cataloging and accessing of information qua information, Facebook is all about the social aspect of information sharing.

Both yield a wealth of data about you, what you do, who you are, where you go, how you do things, and most importantly, what you buy.

But what exactly each empire is doing to get you to do what it wants and needs, that's another story - and evidently one that's not so easily gathered. If I read one, I read 30 articles about what's happened and why and how it's all going to shake out, and I still am having trouble making heads or tails out of it. One thing that was clear, though, was the immediate and gut-level reaction to Facebook's changes and its announcement: "Get a life, it's just Facebook!" screamed the Adopters. "Facebook is my life!" wailed the Avoiders.

I do have to admit that where Google+ (Google's foray into social networking) left me cold, Facebook has always been a warm environment, all about your friends, and sharing, and photos, and telling stories and jokes; I've personally enjoyed sharing some of my favorite music and music discoveries with friends.

The big question, once people get used to what Facebook has done - and will be doing in the months to come - is whether they will abandon the platform and take up Google+, or whether they'll, er, warm up to the new Facebook.

Not too long ago, you couldn't help but notice that list of friends who were online at any given moment that suddenly showed up on the right hand side of your page - some with a green dot next to them, signifying that they were open for chat - IF you had your chat access set to open, as well. Ok, I finally figured that (and its control) out, after wondering how the heck I could both be on Facebook and not  on Facebook if I didn't feel like chatting. Not too long after that, the more observant among us realized that our news was being fed to us differently.

I posted a "fix" to the new way Facebook was sharing your friends posts a while back: while you've never seen every post of every friend, you were at least getting a reasonably sampling of them. Now, however, if you hadn't interacted with a particular friend in a while, you'd see nothing from him or her. You had to go into the settings to change this to allow all your friends' posts to appear without being vetted against some minimal "reaction" gauge. (The idea behind this, the cynics among us decided, was that Facebook wanted you to act in some way, best of all worlds to endorse a product or service by liking it, or responding to a friend's like, thus gaining market intelligence and ideally, selling ads! So FB was sort of "forcing" you to be active, or lose contact with your friends.)

Then came what is called The Ticker. This is also a right column feature in which you are fed a steady stream of your friends comments, posts, likes (and btw, soon likes will not be "likes," but will be a whole range of things like "playing," "watching," "researching," and so on), and activities.

Facebook has also created a whole raft of partnerships with services like Netflix (Spotify, Hulu, Yahoo News, and so on) which will not only tell you what your friends are doing, but allow you to join in the fun.With The Ticker, Zuckerberg claims FB has opened a whole new world of "sharing" the Internet and Information. So, let's say a friend is watching Godzilla versus Mothra on Netflix. You can click into his activity, and join him as he watches, so you are "virtually" at the movies together. Any number of your friends, their friends, their friends' friends and so on and so on can join the party, bring your own popcorn. (A possible unintended consequence is a whole new level of dating: we have regular dates, Saturday night dates [versus "other" nights for second-tier interests], the after-date date, the infamous "booty call," and now a "virtual date:" "Hey, let's tune in to Office Space on Netflix Tuesday at nine, your place and mine?"


Coming to a Facebook near you: a change that has some people troubled, others canceling their subscription. Soon, Facebook apps will only need to ask permission once in order to share stories about your activity on that app. Right now, each time the app wants to post your results of its "what movie star would you most likely phone obsessively" quiz, it had to ask your permission. Now, if it asks you one time, that's all it will ever have to do.

But possibly one of the most hard to swallow of the new FB features: The Timeline. What is it? As one reviewer put it (Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need to Know): "In a complete overhaul of its ever-evolving profile page, Facebook is introducing Timeline. This is a stream of information about you - the photos you've posted, all your status updates, the apps you've used, even the places you've visited on a world map - that scrolls all the way back to your birth. It encourages you to post more stuff about your past, such as baby pictures, using Facebook as a scrapbook.

"The further back in Timeline you go, the more Facebook will compress the information so that you're only seeing the most interesting parts of your h8istory. You can customize this by clicking on a start next to a status, say, or enlarging a picture.

"Timeline is in Beta now, and will be opt-in to start. In the long run, it will become the new default profile page."

All I can say is, "interesting according to whom?" That is to say, if FB is going to make, as it evidently plans to, editorial decisions (which they assure us can be overridden) about what's interesting about my life, who's to say it might not be that drunken post about an amazing party I attended seven years ago as a freshman in college? While it is still in Beta, which means users are testing it and will ostensibly be able to make recommendations about how it functions, right now Timeline can select from literally anything you post, like, link to, or click on within the FB platform. Nothing, as the saying goes, is sacred (or hidable, or deletable).

Some FB users quietly revolted several years ago by moving to Better Facebook (betterfacebook.net), a free browser extension that "improves the Facebook site by adding lots of great enhancements and functionality. It runs in most browsers (except for IE!? of course) and installs in just a minute."

Others are packing up their Likes and Status Updates and exiting FB in modest but potentially massive droves for the less intrusive Google+. Just as Facebook's mousetrap was a better version than the mind-bendingly confused and confusing MySpace, so Google+ may be a better way to slice bread, assuming users remain as hostile to the changes to their beloved interface as they have been so far. Early polling indicates that a significant number of users are actively unhappy about the new Facebook, and only likely to become more so as the changes continue to roll out.

At stake: Facebook's 750 million users worldwide, and its status as the world's #1 ranked social networking service. Now if someone could just *explain* Google+ to me, I'd have a valid opinion of which service I think is best. All I can really be sure of at this point: it is a battle for world domination, and we all have front row seats.

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