You’ve just joined a heap of new communities! At least, that’s what facebook is telling me on all of these new community pages.
Community, or Collection of Crap?
Check this one out – Cooking, a lot of people like cooking, 2.5 million have it as a “like” in their profile. By facebook law that seems to mean they’re / you’re members of the facebook cooking community. That’s regardless of whether you’ve been notified that your posts are being scrubbed for keywords and presented as contributions within this new format.
This section from the intro is particularly surprising, “…the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic.”
To me this seems like a very underhanded way to extract monetary value from the userbase. That best collection is actually a collection of posts not intended for this page, given some sort of context thanks to a description and image ripped straight from Wikipedia.
I’m undecided on whether this is a move to shift how we use facebook, moving users from personal networking to community-publishing, or if it’s just the next logical step in facebook’s growth. After all, we started with individual profiles, then we got groups and pages, and now we’ve got communities built on top of all of that.
Truthfully, I suspect these are just a step towards refining search and portal components to better compete with google and the like. That’s where the money is in terms of serving targeted ads and sponsored content.
Take a second and check out your profile. Chances are you’ve listed at least a few interests, and now when your posts contain keyword matches they’re being pulled into these community pages.
What do you think?
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