This guy seems to have captured what I thought I’d been seeing over the past couple of months on facebook. It is not surprising as many pundits predicted issues for facebook users when it went public due to profit pressures.

According to the Facebook website, you also have a goal, and it is “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”
…
As an advertising tool, Facebook will still connect millions around the world, but only as a consequence of a different goal and guiding principle. A goal to monetize its user-base by managing, controlling and limiting the way people share and connect. The exact opposite of its stated mission.

Full post here: http://www.bewareofimages.com/blog/2012/11/open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg/#more-200

While I love the micropublishing, aggregation and discovery capabilities of what facebook can offer, the way they choose to filter and limit is becoming unpleasant to me as a “consumer” and “producer”. I recently paid $7 for promoting a post for my wife’s recently opened etsy shop and it certainly seems like the rest of my posts suddenly got a lot less views. Or at least less feedback. It is also possible that I’m just not posting interesting things too. I don’t mind paying to get people who aren’t my “friends” to see my posts. That’s advertising and is reasonable. But paying to show my posts to people who are my “friends” feels like extortion of the data we gave to facebook.

Anyway, enough complaining. If facebook isn’t a good place to form and build networks of friends, we can always go back to email, or RSS readers and private blogs. That certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world. I guess we could all try google+, but that might be a bit extreme ;-)