UNLIKE FACEBOOK

I am appalled that the free service that I am in no way obligated to use, keeps making changes that inconvenience me.

That statement is really kinda funny if you think about it, but that's what it's come to at these internet social meeting places these days. Facebook has made the guy who created it, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest guys in his 20's in this quadrant of the Milky Way. And he did it by just taking something that really already existed, a virtual place for people to gather. There's been chatrooms and message boards or forums for years where people could go and share whatever their heart's desired. Invite who you want to, talk about whatever you want to. There was even a social network similar to Facebook that already existed, MySpace. MySpace still exists, as do chatrooms and message boards, but Facebook came along and the masses just started flocking to it.

With over 800 million users, that's about 11.5% of the population of the planet, advertisers were foaming at the mouth with a way to reach a whole lot of potential customers like never before. And with mega-advertising reaching to a mega-audience, the money comes rolling in. And truthfully, there's nothing wrong with that. That's capitalism baby! With all the advertising putting all those gozillions of dollars into Zuckerberg's wallet, room has to be made to show that advertising.

I've been on Facebook about a year and a half, 2 years maybe, and in that short time, there have already been several changes made. And like most things in the world these days, change doesn't always mean for the better. In the short time I've been on, the more personalized page that I used to have has become much less personal in order to fit the advertising in.

The latest change though, the one that has users currently flooding "newsfeeds" of how they're upset with the change, is another example of if it's not broke, don't fix it. I think back to the first sentence in this blog entry, and though true, there's no gun to my head to use this service, I do believe that if you offer a service, get people buying into and liking it, so much so that you're an overnight billionaire, then you start making changes that take away from why people use that service and brought everyone there in the first place, then you might be starting your own downfall. Of course if you're a billionaire I don't know how much that really matters to you.

Facebook is a neat little idea. I've been a message board user talking about a local sports teams since the late '90's, and all Facebook really is the way I see it, is your own personal message board. And I've seen message boards make changes that the members didn't appreciate and abandoned those sites and moved elsewhere. With the way the world works these days, the next new thing is right around the corner (see Twitter), and if Facebook makes changes that their users don't like, or that make it difficult to navigate and keep up with, those users will drop off. And when that happens, the advertisement dollar starts to shrink.

So you see, Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg, even though it's a free service to nearly a billion people that no one is forcing those nearly billion users to use, it's because of those nearly billion people that you have all those billions under your mattress.

So seriously, stop inconveniencing me by changing my free service that no one is making me use. I'm tired of all the status changes showing up in my newsfeed that I don't know how to navigate through any more.