Expansion of Facebook A Threat To Diversity

Facebook (FB) has recently announced plans for expansion.  Major news and media websites will now feature buttons from the social networking site. This has nothing to do with making the internet more useful.  It is an insidious attempt to make brainless consumers of us all.

Established and respected sites such as The New York Times and TripAdvisor will now feature FB buttons.  You will be invited to 'Like' content.  This information will be stored on your account and shared with your 'friends'.

Aggregate 'likes' will be stored and used to rank content in search results.

In this way websites with more FB content are likely to dominate the internet.  It is already hard enough to find independent and quality content online.  Intelligent blogs and local news sources are likely to become even more invisible.

Behind this lies massive commercial interest.  By discovering what a majority of FB users 'like' advertisements will become even more targeted.  Few people realise that the pressure to conform on FB is massive.  Everyone wants to update their profile with random sentences about themselves and pictures as often as possible.  Once this fever to copy everyone else spreads to the rest of the internet, big business will be laughing.  Ultimately, this will lead to a homogenous mass of online consumers.

What implications this will have for society at large will be explored here in future posts.

For now SZ recommends sharing as little information on FB as possible.  Exploit the power of online social networking - don't let it exploit you.