On Facebook, We Are The Commodity

Last September, Facebook foisted one of its biggest changes on its users. Like many others, I found myself faced with an almost unmanageable volume of postings on my newsfeed. The change was already bad enough to deal with, but Facebook made it clear that it was to decide what was important to me, and what could be ignored from my feed. It took me hours to configure my feed the way I wanted. And it took weeks before Facebook decided to honor my settings. But eventually the postings settled down to a more or less acceptable volume. And I discovered the trick of bookmarking https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr which always brings me to a "recent stories first" view.

To make things easier to handle, I also went through my Facebook friends, and unfriended about a third of them. Sometimes it seems like people treat Facebook as a game where the one with the most friends wins. But I didn't see much point in having such a large list of Facebook friends.

And I'm sure I'm not the only one who got the impression that Facebook didn't really care about the privacy of user information. They haven't always made it clear or easy to configure the privacy settings. Even after a flood of news articles about the importance of using the proper privacy settings, I still see many of my friends post personal family details to the whole world. I cringe whenever I see photos of children shared with the public, or when I see a persons location posted to the public. And not everyone is aware that that's happening. As a result of my own privacy concerns, I deleted almost all of my own photo albums off of Facebook, even the albums that were visible only to specific groups of people.

And then there's Facebook's new Timeline feature. Mind you, I have nothing to hide about my past postings. However, I just didn't see any point in making my past so accessible to my friends. And so I spent about four hours deleting and hiding past postings. Going forward, I plan on pruning my Timeline on a regular basis and keep just about a months worth of postings. That is, if I post at all.

With all that preamble in mind, I finally get the point of this blog posting: A couple of days ago, I mentioned to someone on Facebook that on Google+, I feel a lot less like a commodity than I do on Facebook.

Lets look at the business of Facebook. It's expected that within a couple of months, Facebook will go public with an IPO. Some people predict that Facebook will be worth $100 billion. What does Facebook own that's worth $100B? The only tangible asset they have is their user database. With about 800 million users, each user is worth about $125 to Facebook. People have gladly provided detailed personal information about themselves, where they live, what they like, and who their friends are, which Facebook can use in their own marketing endeavors. And every time you give applications access to your personal profile, you are allowing them to better target their campaigns.

So, with that in mind, whenever I go on to Facebook, I don't feel like a person. I feel like a commodity. Frankly, I count on Facebook too much to leave it completely. However, I just don't bother posting as much as I used to.

Lately, I've been encouraging my friends and acquaintances to check out Google+. Sure, they're a business too. But Google seems to be much more concerned about user privacy. And although Google+ doesn't have as many users, the quality of the postings seems much higher there. I just find it a much more comfortable place to do on-line social networking. Facebook isn't going to disappear any time soon. However, I think Google+ will, over time, attract a much more discerning audience.