If you haven’t noticed, Facebook is once again causing a great deal of buzz. The rumors of charging its users for usage are again surfacing. There have been big changes in the last week to profiles. Facebook has essentially become a scrap book of memorabilia that has your data in chronological order. There are also some reports that Facebook is tracking your web usage even after you have logged off. If you are having a hard time sifting through what to make of Facebook these days you can keep reading to make sense of the changes and the buzz.
There does not appear to be any direct evidence that Facebook will begin charging its users. This rumor appears to be false. It appears that a chain letter has surfaced and is running through profiles like a viral infection. The chain letter reads in caps and warns that Facebook users will soon be charged as a result of the changes in the profile. It also adds that this was verified by the news. The letter began to surface after the f8 conference in San Francisco.
The profile changes are obvious but can be modified. When you open a Facebook page you now see what your top friends are posting on other people’s walls. Some fine this offensive as they don’t always want everyone on their friend list to see what they have posted elsewhere. As a general rule, people are sharing more on social networks than ever before. That is what drives Facebook to such success. The new profile adds an overview of who you are and information about you. You can also highlight the friends that are most important to you. This will give you the opportunity to see more about what these friends are doing and what they are posting. There also appears to be more room on the Facebook page for advertisements.
The other newest allegation is that Facebook is going to track your every move even after you have logged out. This can occur by the tracking cookies being modified by the site to keep track of unique tokens that can be used to identify you. If you visit any page that contains a Facebook button, the site can still track what you are doing. This is an interesting development in the quest to keep track of users and utilize information for potential advertising and marketing. This can also open users (especially those using public portals) to a major security risk.
In all, it will be interesting to see how the new Facebook competes with Google + which is slowly gaining users as it pushes to directly face off with the untouchable Facebook. Many users are expressing discontent about the increasing changes. While tweens, teens and twenty somethings are quick to accept changes readily, those thirty and above are not as happy. Users who are not very technologically savvy are not happy about changes to Facebook that are confusing and appear to make the interface harder to understand. This may open an avenue for Google+ to take advantage of. In the end, Facebook still dominates the social networking sites and is still a major newsmaker.