Amber Buchholz, Business Analyst (@ambersafa)
Just today I noticed a comment under my friend’s status update, a link offering to show me 2 similar posts to Kat Seltzer’s summer yoga workshops:
I clicked the link, assuming Facebook had found a new way to insert paid advertisements onto my radar, and that I would be exposed to an ad for additional summer workshops in the Bend, Oregon area.
Instead, clicking the link simply expanded my stream of updates to reveal two more posts by Kat, both of them advertising additional class offerings and their times:
The question is, why has Facebook added this feature? I will watch to see whether this is a way to collapse multiple updates from the same person that come in rapid succession, or if the “collapsing” is biased towards status updates that mention a service or product. My hunch is that Facebook is trying to find a way to make it more difficult to use personal accounts for free advertising, and I am curious to see how “smart” their filters are.
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U P D A T E :
After posting this observation a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen Facebook condensing multiple updates enough times to draw any conclusions. Yesterday, however, I discovered that my hypothesis must be wrong when Julie Anderson posted several non-advertisement status updates in quick succession. At first I saw this:
Then I expanded the posts and discovered this:
Clearly there is nothing but commentary in these posts. No dates, times or prices are mentioned, unlike in Kat Seltzer’s status updates shown above. My assumptions of nefarious filtering behavior by Facebook have thus been disproven.
However! I was captivated by yet another Facebook innovation, discovered in the lower right hand corner of Sarah Cofer’s status update. Facebook and Twitter have been positioned in recent months as bitter rivals, especially since many users think Facebook’s revamped interface borrowed much from the Twitter playbook. But Facebook, it seems, is playing nice with Twitter, even going so far as to direct users to the Twitter site.
Last 5 posts by Amber Buchholz
- Can Social Media Save Dying Newspapers? - May 3rd, 2009
- Enterprise Level Search Discussion - April 18th, 2009
- Twitter Marketing Tutorial - April 10th, 2009
- GSI Launches Social Media Brunches - January 8th, 2009
Tags: Facebook
