What’s up with Facebook? Every day this week seems to bring a new announcement about some tweak to the way the network operates, and that’s before next week’s F8 event, where we expect to hear about a music service, possibly operated by Spotify.
Rory Cellan-Jones
via BBC News – Is Facebook losing its identity?
I’ve been playing around with some of the new features on social networking site Facebook today.
I’ve discovered that it is now possible to subscribe to a user’s profile, using the new Facebook Subscribe button.
Facebook users can choose whether to enable it or not – and once enabled you can then choose which posts are available to the public and which are not.
Sounds like a nice idea, but surely those who wish to make their updates available to the public could just create themselves a Facebook page – like I did back in 2009; any Facebook user can click on to my public page and click on the ‘Like’ button, whilst my personal profile remains private.
One of the reasons I’m questioning this, is that Facebook has always been a service you use to communicate with friends, whilst Twitter is very much aimed at people who want to follow all the celebrities, journalists, politicians and other public figures.
BUT… I think it could be quite a useful tool. The majority of my status updates on Facebook are limited to those who have added me as a friend, and if I want something to be available to the public there’s a button I can find quite easily to make it public.
Combine this with the new Improved Friend Lists, which are apparently being rolled out over the next few weeks. For a while Facebook has had the ability for users to add their friends to lists – for example I have a list for family, radio contacts and uni contacts. But now soon, when I post a status update I will be able to choose which group(s) can view them.
Let me know what you think of the changes being made to Facebook this week. Comment below or e-mail editor@blog.fred-hart.co.uk.
