23 9 / 2011
Facebook as Tastemaker
New features are being added to Facebook to help the site become more of a force that shapes what we watch, hear, read and buy. Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope to influence what users and their friends consume. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.
A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. On the site you can also be able to more precisely signal what you’re reading, watching, hearing, eating, etc. All this information can be used by Facebook to sell more fine-tuned advertising.
I found the final quote in this article really interesting:
“Facebook wants to be omnipresent in the Web experience by adding commerce, video and mail to their early successes with news feeds and picture tagging,” said Jodee Rich, founder of People Browsr, based in San Francisco, which analyzes data from social networks. “Trying to be all things to all people was the undoing of Microsoft and AOL. If Facebook continues to overreach, they will stumble.”
In class, we’re continually discussing the changes of Facebook and it’s attempts to compete with Google +. All of Facebook’s recent changes seem to be making most users mad and annoyed, but they keep on pushing these changes. So how far can Facebook push the line until it does go too far, as suggested by Rich? Considering the past “undoing of Microsoft and AOL,” Facebook should be careful in it’s efforts to become omnipresent.
