Facebook owns you

[Undertoad]

6. Noticed that FB was screening the FB friends I had not blocked and was mainly posting the stream from only certain friends, they were in essence screening or managing my feed with no guidance from me.

This is true. There's a setting somewhere that defaults to show you only the friends with whom you have recently interacted. You have to go in and set it to "all".

I imagine this was set up so that one's feed wouldn't be filled with items from people one doesn't really care about.

Now the feed will be filled with items you don't care about from people you do care about, which is weird.

My worry is that developers are now focusing on FB as a platform, so increasingly, there will be things you can't even do without it.

When Spotify came to the US I immediately fell in love with it as a way of playing music and finding new music. Well last week Spotify announced that you can't use it if you don't have a Facebook account. Of course this is the result of back room deals and accumulating power against the media companies. But who wasn't consulted: the users, who don't want it and who don't necessarily get anything out of it.

You don't have to actually post to FB with your Spotify, but the default behavior is that it posts every song you listen to to your feed. I do not want to annoy my friends with that kind of detail. I try to post no more than one item every day or two.

The benefit for FB is that there are "play" buttons in FB which let people play the music that you've shared. Well I ran my college radio station back in the day, and my radio show was called "Songs you like but have never heard before", specializing in finding little-heard awesome music. But I don't want to share all my songs!! So who does this appeal to, beyond FB trying to be everything for everybody?

I wonder if the entire appeal is to the under-40s who approach this all differently. All I can think is, Myspace became popular partly for its easy music integration, and fell out of favor *permanently* when it became annoying. Now FB has done its music integration, and became a little more annoying, on the same day.

[chrisinhouston]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Well I ran my college radio station back in the day,

Funny, I had my first radio job at WRAS in Atlanta, owned by Georgia State University, they played what was referred to as "progressive" back in the mid 70's. I started with the 2am-6am shift which was where every beginning disk jockey started. It's no wonder my grades were bad as I fell asleep in most of my classes.

Back to FB, I read one commentary that reminded readers that Internet conglomerates often end up failing or downsizing when they try to be everything to everybody and don't succeed and cited AOL and Microsoft as examples. The reality is that with every new incarnation there is something else around the corner from someone else.