Is it just me, or has Facebook lost it’s soul? The whole original premise of the site was a perfect storm for success: college students, later non-students easily able to connect with each other around the world. Great, sign me up! As with any Internet startup, there comes a point where they need to grow. They need to prove to investors and the mainstream that they are not simply a curiosity. I believe, for Facebook, it was around they introduced the Fan pages (which are now “Liking” something, same thing with different vocabulary). Fan pages gave business’, non-profits, groups, clubs, etc a platform to broadcast their message out to a lot of people at once. While in principal this is the same premise as Twitter, this was fully integrated into Facebook’s walled garden.

In order to keep up with future of the open web, Twitter, and being more visible in Google search, Facebook began experimenting with unlocking our data. First it was the confusing privacy settings, the accidental public settings for the photo albums, and now to the latest: the profile/fan page linking. In the age of the Internet, where free and openness reigns, business can take more and more advantage of this public data. I believe this is the idea behind Facebook’s ongoing destruction of it’s own walled garden. It also doesn’t help that the privacy settings require a PhD to deciefer. The more Facebook goes down this path of opening for the sake of business and leaving their original base of people connecting with other people, I feel they are loosing the magic of what originally made Facebook so popular.