Shadow Karma

I’m sure most of you know how people have sang the theme from Loveboat with the lyrics “Fail boat…”. It seems to be Failboat is now history and we’ve got ourselves a new and improved fail: Failbook..um.. I mean Facebook.

When talking about Facebook and marketing, I’m the first one to say it can be a good place. Not to mention keeping in touch with people. But I’m also ready to point out it’s not perfect, far from it, and it hasn’t been. Unfortunately with the recent changes they’ve done on the site, the quality has gone down. It’s actually getting worse than Myspace and that’s quite an achievement in my book. And I’m not even going to start with the “Like” button, which makes communication on Facebook impossible (you can read a good blog post about it from here.

I wrote a couple of months ago about Facebook removing the Iron Sky page. They returned it in less than 24 hours without any explanations about why it was removed. Only couple of weeks ago Timo Vuorensola, the director of Iron Sky left Facebook and wrote a good blog post about why he left Facebook. Had only five minutes passed after the blog post and Facebook had created a community site for Timo Vuorensola. The problem was there was (and still isn’t) any way to control or get any use from people “liking” the community site.

After looking into the situation, the guys at Energia Productions noticed Facebook is creating “community pages” about nearly every article in Wikipedia. Sounds good, so far. Not only are they creating pages for “good” things (such as cars or dogs or cute puppies or whathaveyou) but they’re creating pages for things such as “Nazism and Faschism”, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and of course Child Sexual Abuse. (The liks might not work as they might remove the pages but they’ve been there for some three days already so…) Keep in mind, this is Facebook which tries to keep it’s nose away from ANY offensive material.

Now looking at the pages, you might wonder why anyone would “like” those things. Most people don’t. However, Facebook is trying to be clever. Before you could write your interests down the way you liked but now all the interests are “pages you like”, which means Facebook not only creates a new page for all the interests but tries to find the page “closest” to the thing you’ve put as your interest. In my case it said quite reasonable things but also “Graffiti”. I’ve got no idea why or where it came from.

The problem with all the pages and interests is that it might turn some meanings around. I’m pretty sure one of the people who (accoding to Facebook) “like” Child Sexual Abuse has had something like “against child sexual abuse” on their profile. As there is no page like that, Facebook has decided it must mean this.

Lately I’ve heard too many news about the security flaws on Facebook and the problems with the “Like” button and stuff. The future, as I see it, seems to be quite grim. No privacy (and I don’t even need much of it), no way of communicating and no use for companies to use Facebook. My company still has a Facebook page but I’m afraid if my company ever gets bigger it will not be the only page and after that it might be impossible to have any discussions on Facebook with my clients or the companies I work with on. Not to mention people having interests in stuff like “Pedophilia” or something similar and I really don’t think that’s ok.

So, Facebook, please: GET A GRIP and get your stuff together. There are many people willing to use Facebook for several things but not like this!