Facebook’s Forces Opt-In or Blank Profiles
It seems that Facebook’s new Community Pages (how-to here) are part of a grander scheme to get Facebook users to connect with stuff. Remember all those random keywords you used to fill out your profile? Stuff like your favorite movies and books? Well, Facebook has basically turned them all into actual Community Pages. Instead of just listing Blade or The Science of Getting Rich as stuff you like and leaving it at that, Facebook has taken it upon itself to turn each of these words or phrases into a link. These links connect you to the Community page for those items.
You may have noticed a popup telling you to connect your profile with a bunch of stuff when you recently logged into Facebook. This is where the conversion part happens, where they turn your simple keywords into actual social connections and links. You can choose to connect to all the pages displayed or pick from them individually. I would suggest you do the latter because I noticed a few surprises while looking through my own choices.
Keep in mind, this is the opt-in part. When you accept these connections, people will see these links on your Facebook profile. They will probably believe these are things that you have chosen to be connected to. The links will lead to communities based around those things. What if you decide you don’t actually want all of that excitement on your profile? You just want to keep things simple and define yourself without all these 3rd party connections. The problem is that you can’t.
According to the Facebook FAQ “What if I don’t want to connect to all these pages?”
“If you don’t want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don’t want to connect to.”
While you’re not really being forced to opt-in, the alternative is unacceptable. Either you connect to the pages or your profile will be blank. The affected sections include: Work and Education, Current City, Hometown, and Likes and Interest. You will have to make a tough decision between a blank Facebook profile and a profile that may not describe you exactly as you would like. It’s one thing to simply list something on your profile as an interest and totally another to actually connect yourself to an entire community on the subject.
Which will you choose?
more details at RWW
Category: News | Tags: community pages, facebook, Privacy
About the Author Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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Agreed. Even for brands or topics that I like, I don't like the page they end up linking to. If I end up back on FB for some odd reason, I may clean all that up. I'm not really a Facebook junky, so all this extra work is a huge bother
I do not like the facebook changes!!!!!!!
Oooohhh….don't force me into such a BAD choice. Shame shame. Guess I'll have a blank profile then. *sticking tongue out*
Extremely annoying. I'm about to let go of Facebook altogether. This really pisses me off!
Yes, I agree with App. The linking is incorrect. Like for my schools…each of them has done a great job of building a following but instead of linking to those pages, FB links to these new community pages which have like one or two “fans” or whatever the hell we're calling them these days…”likers?”
So, at best the new process is flawed. My profile is now almost completely blank. No music, books, interests…I may like a TV show but not enough to add their page to my stream. If FB is trying to improve the user experience, they went about it the totally wrong way. As one of my Twitter buddies said, “They've gone all AOL on us.” And, we all know how that ended…
The big problem I have with this is that they are not linking to the correct pages. I would rather link to the artist's official fan page than one of the many imitations and flat out forgeries.
Funny thing about this timing…
About an hour before I got the popup I went through all the searches the keywords were originally linking to, because I was bored. Never actually did that before, and wondered when I got the popup if it was related to all that searching I did from those same keyword links.