Connecting to Everything You Care About = Clutter

Last month, Facebook revealed its latest update by introducing the new “Community Pages” and subsequently caused waves of confusion (and then anger) amongst its users. The new Community Pages arrived to replace what were once “Fan Pages” and insert themselves – uninvited – into our personal profiles, making it impossible to list anything in the Information section without automatically including a link leading to a Community Page on that topic.

While the Facebook Help Center explains that this update is an improvement from the previous format because the new pages “enable you to see what people are saying about the things that matter to you,” I couldn’t help but feel a little exposed as I realized that if I could see all of the people linked to the Community Page that I was linked to, then that entire community could obviously see me…

My frustration further mounted as I went on to investigate what a Community Page actually consists of and discovered that the content is comprised entirely of text and images from Wikipedia, which Facebook has licensed under the creative commons license.

So, my personal profile is now linked to thousands of stranger’s profiles and narrated by an anonymous voice at Wikipedia while being crowded with icons that I cannot remove. I know I’m not the only one concerned by this sudden loss of control over my profile’s content because I’ve been subjected to my friends’ complaints and threats of profile deletion since the changeover began in mid-April. I had hoped that somehow my account might escape this dreaded fate, however, my profile just mutated last night so I feel compelled to ask if anyone out there was troubled by the latest Facebook update and if so, has it grown on you?

Let me know…