Dear Facebook, I don’t like you this morning

Dear Facebook,

I don’t like you this morning. Why? Because you’ve made some changes that (a) come over as you bullying me, and (b) create a whole load of duff content that’s even worse than the Google Ad revenue chasing content-free spam sites which still clog up too many search results. Facebook used to be better than that.

To be precise, when I logged in this morning you gave me a choice. Either link items of my profile to newly created community pages or have them removed, instantly, from my profile.

No option to think about how it works or try things out. Just an enforced choice then and there before I could move on to another screen.

Now I know all about the frustrations of telling users something and them ignoring it – and so the temptation, and even at times need, to force events along with carefully chosen defaults. But this went far further than that.

Especially as much of the content that you force me to link to is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely awful. Take a look at http://bit.ly/9U3Rz7 [thankfully no more]. You’ve created a Community Page around my job title? I’d like to be flattered, but the truth is that this is just like the auto-created ‘content’ you find on websites that are chasing Google Ad revenue from people who land on them by mistake after a search.

It’s duff, irrelevant content – and it’s content that you are deliberately creating on a large-scale.

Even worse, you suggested I get community pages created for a whole load of other terms – including ones for the word “necessarily” and “order”.

That’s not valuable community content. That’s a mistake that will pollute Facebook with naff content- and one which you are forcing on users.

So as I said, Facebook – this morning, I don’t like you.

Perhaps someone in Facebook will realise trying to force a user into creating a community page for the word “necessarily” shows something has gone badly wrong.

I hope so.

Best wishes,

Mark